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After a few weeks of testing Rowmote now I’m really happy with this toolset.

I never – never! – had any kind of problems with the application. Since I’ve started using it the app has updated continuatly (now I’m using version 1.5) -installation process was really easy and I never had to do it manually! Once connected to the MBP I was notified about the availability of a new version (Rowmote helper – this part runs on the MBP). On the iPhone side updates have been pushed via the AppStore update functionality for applications.

Also very convenient: not updating the Rowmote Helper tool does NOT mean not to be able using it anymore – it still worked like a charm.
Rowmote at iTunes
Rowmote Home

Seams to be a lucky day 🙂
Today I restarted a trial on the backup of my MBP via AirportExtreme and the Drobo – and it works…

This day I’ve deleted my profile at last.fm.

Why I did this? Well – as I am not a citizen of one of the preferred countries of last.fm I otherwise would have to pay a fee of € 3,–/month.
And that’s definitly not what I’d liked to do.

So – sorry for them, no scrobbling of music data anymore from my clients… bye, bye last.fm…

Really bad to drive with the car at this snowy day yesterday. The photo was taken at 07:45 in the morning…
But the longer the day was the finer the wetter became – sometimes the sun came out between the clouds and spring was showing up…

Yesterday evening – after training – I went with a friend into a local restaurant arresting a (or two 😉 ) glasses of beer.
The waitress suddenly came along and told us she has to leave now for about 20min – she has an appointment with her doctor. It was 23:30 local time…
She told us that she would close the door behind her and even lock it down so that nobody could come in… and of course nobody could leave 🙂
Really funny thing… after about 30mins she came back and everything was fine again…
We were not the only guests at this time – but WE were the one and only she ínformed about!

After recognizing that my drobo failed due to a problem (…a known problem at seagate…) I googled around and found that the problem will get worse on time.
Users reported that their drives (Barracuda 7200.11, 1TB cap. – Model …340AS) have been locked down after a while and they couldn’t get out data because the drives even won’t be recognized any more on BIOS level…
Yesterday I downloaded the firmware update for the drive – but have to organize an external SATA dock to upgrade. DROBO is not useable to update the firmware of drives…
… today the support page at seagate vanished… only a dead link remains on their knowledge page.
A friend of mine, told me he also had the problem with the drive and got an exchange via Seagate Munich – so maybe this would be the way I’ll go now.
Another friend of mine also has troubles with his drobo which are related to a Seagate drive out of this series…

Update
Seems that they have a problem with the knowledge-DB at seagate. All links are not working…

So I decided to connect it not via the Airport Extreme – i connected it directly via Firewire.

This trial showed me the error-dialog you can see on the left side.

But I was a little bit happy about the fact that I was able to backup my data stored on the Drobo back to my MBP.

Well – I bought the Drobo to store data in a save way on an external disk – but it seems that the Drobo was the wrong choice – instead of backing up data to the Drobo I’m now backing up data to my laptop —> definitly the wrong way it goes…

I gave now the Drobo support a try – waiting what happens next…

Update: 13th March, 2009
What a perfect support by Drobo Inc. 🙂
Just opened a support case I was contacted in a perfect way – direct questions related to the issue, fine communication between different contacts at Drobo Inc Support and a fast result for their analyses about the issue itself.

It looks like I’ll have to blame Seagate and not Drobo – the problem seems to be a 1TB seagate disk which is used in my drobo:

There’s a knowledge base entry with several tools to check your drives at the seagate page – thank’s to Steven Ponder (Drobo Support) for providing the link.

I powered up my DROBO about two days ago and recognized that the noise issue I had before (running fan, not going into standby) seamed to be not so a problem any more (it was really quiet…)…

But today I wanted to store some files on the DROBO and in the background TimeMachine tried to backup my MacBook Pro – the result I got was a loss of network connection due to a reboot of the DROBO.

I re-powered the DROBO and checked the system LEDs —> showing me now that there is a thermal (overheating) problem with the black box in front of me… I’m now a little bit disappointed!

What the hell should this damned error message tell me – of course the box is too hot…. but it IS NOT too hot. It’s pretty cool – so what’s about this error… have to examine over the next hours… to be continued

Well, after a while of being offline – my iPhone is now online in HOKI too!