My Drobo suddenly reports it's in data protection mode, why?
Drive bay lights flash Green and Yellow
A number of factors can cause your Drobo storage device to go into data protection mode:
- As time goes by, some drives may develop bad blocks. The Drobo device responds by going into data protection to redistribute the data around these bad blocks.
- When a drive goes bad, the data must be redistributed among the remaining drives.
- When you add or remove a drive, your Drobo storage device must begin a process of safely redistributing data across all available drives.
- If you have enabled Dual Disk Redundancy, Drobo will go into data protection to relayout the data to protect against two simultaneous drive failures
The data protection process can take a while, from a few minutes to several hours or longer, depending on the amount of data. The time depends upon the amount of data on the Drobo device, the size of the files, the speed of the host, etc. If your Drobo device encounters bad blocks on the hard drives, etc., that will extend the time it takes for data protection as well.
During the data protection process:
- Your Drobo device is mounted and data accessible.
- You can continue to use your Drobo storage device to access files or run programs.
- You can move data to and from the Drobo storage device.
- You may turn your computer off.
Once the drive lights stay solid green, the data protection process is complete. During the data protection process, Drobo Dashboard will give you an estimated time for data protection to complete ( it is not abnormal for the Drobo to lose connection with the Dashboard ).
Note: During the data protection process, you will see a message indicating Drobo cannot currently protect your data against hard drive failure:
- Do not turn off the power to your Drobo device during a relayout. However, you may disconnect it from your host computer, by ejecting (Mac) or Safely Removing Hardware (PC).
- Do not add or remove a drive from Drobo during this process.
- For more information on Data Protection see; Data Protection - Yellow/Green Flashing Lights (https://youtu.be/uWvgdMcPGb8 )
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Keywords: relayout, data protection, lights flashing, green, yellow