From what I can tell from the few minutes of research I've done it 
appears that all of the RAID options their "BeyondRAID" uses supports 
some sort of redundancy (Single and dual depending on RAID type).

If a single drive is dying and the other one is healthy he should be 
able to just replace the dying drive and allow parity to rebuild or the 
disk to re-mirror.

If he is concerned about data loss I'd grab an external USB drive and 
rsync the data between the Drobo and the external to have a backup copy 
in case things do not go well during the rebuild.

If the array is toast then you're most likely looking at some sort of 
professional recovery service unless Drobo support has suggestions on 
how to get the array back online read-only to recover the data.

One thing to always keep in mind: RAID is not a backup.  I've had to 
state this too many times recently.  While it prevents data loss from a 
disk failure (or multiple failures) it is not an excuse not to have a 
good backup.

--Adam


On 2013-11-21 13:24, Michael Moore wrote:
> Does anyone have experience recovering data from a Drobo storage 
> device? 
> 
> A friend's Drobo device is dying, one of the drives is likely on its
> last legs and he's looking to get his data off of it. 
> 
> I haven't done anything with Raid, and from Drobo marketing online I
> can't tell if their "BeyondRaid" is real Raid or not. 
> 
> If the Drobo is real Raid, what information would I need to get to
> figure out the next steps to recovering the data off of a good drive? 
> 
> --
> Michael Moore
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