Drobo, a popular brand of connected storage arrays, has today issued a notable software update that should cheer up some Mac users. The company’s new drive software now more easily works with OS X’s Time Machine backup service. By default, Time Machine automatically allocates storage in external drives to be wholly used for Time Machine backups. If you want to use a single Drobo drive for holding both a Time Machine backup and separate stored data, you would have to simply manually drop folders into the drive’s Finder window. Today’s Drobo update adds functionality to make this process and data separation more automated:
- No need for complicated partitioning of the main volume in order to reserve space for backups.
- The size of this volume can be set to a fixed capacity for Time Machine to use.
- The ability to set capacity limits eliminates the need to create sparse bundle files.
- Time Machine Backup Volume wizard auto detects the best size based on the internal disk capacity.
- Encryption such as OS X FileVault is supported on a Drobo Time Machine Backup Volume.
- Can delete and recreate the Backup Volume with a different size without affecting the data volume.
The free update for the latest Drobo hardware can be downloaded from Drobo’s website.
