Data Robotics gives Drobo FS full Time Machine compatibility
When Data Robotics announced the Drobo FS last month, one common complaint among potential buyers was that it doesn't offer native support for doing networked Time Machine backups. Just connecting a Drobo FS to a network of Macs could cause issues for Time Machine backups, since the built-in backup feature of Mac OS X tends to consume every last morsel of space it can and even the huge capacity of the Drobo FS could be chewed up quickly.
Data Robotics announced today that the Drobo FS now supports network-based Time Machine backups. The company shipped a new version of Drobo Dashboard for the FS allowing the creation of shares for Time Machine use. In Dashboard v1.7.2, there's now a control to enable Time Machine support on a Drobo array, then set a maximum size for the share so that the backup files don't take over all of the space on the device.
The company has released the code that they wrote to specify volume sizes into the Open Source Community. The Netatalk project, hosted on SourceForge, provides a Unix/Linux daemon that is available to all Linux developers and any other vendors who sell to Mac OS X users.
