SD backup of a Drobo to another one ?

[Francois]

I have 2 Drobo 5D, let us call them A and B. They show on the Mac desktop as 2 volumes each , "virtual" volumes since each represents the data stored in an array of HDD drives arranged in a kind of RAID.
Now A contains data and I want to use Super Duper to backup A data on Drobo B. The first backup should be "erase all files on B then copy".

There comes my question : Will SD erase only the data seen by OS X on the Drobo B volume ( as I believe it will), or is there a risk that the special Drobo software (which runs the Dobo system and is scattered on its 4 drives) be damaged (or erased too) ?

After the initial backup, there will be "smart" ones and there should be no problem there. I should be just like backing up one non bootable volume to another.

Thanks in advance for expert advice !

[dnanian]

The erase will be no different than a Disk Utility erase. As far as I am aware, Drobo doesn't store any kind of magical file on the regular disk volumes.

[Francois]

Thanks Dave.
It's my understanding that the Drobo software is not like a file , but much more like the nodes of a file system. Therefore the "virtual volume" of many terabytes seen on the desktop is just like an ordinary Mac volume. Then SD can be used safely to backup a Drobo to another one.

Just tell me if I am right.

[dnanian]

No, the "Drobo Software" is the firmware, basically. It emulates a large drive with a bunch of disks. It's more like RAID than anything else.

Anyway, as I said, it's basically no different than any other volume to Disk Utility's erase, and SuperDuper, too.

[Francois]

Thanks for your help, Dave.
I received my Mac Pro 6.1 one week ago and could at last experiment (there is allways some St Thomas in us).
I'm glad to report that SuperDuper did an excellent job with the 1,8 TB of data countained on the source Drobo. First it erased the target Drobo then copied all files to it. That was lengthy ( about 4 hours ). The second backup was made a few days later, after some 8 GB had been witten on the source Drobo. This smart update took exactly 2 minutes 51 seconds ! (TB connection, daisy chained).
During that short time, SD showed incredible copy speeds ( for ex. ~25000 MB/s) I wonder if they are real ? (I have TB 1 cables , Theoretical transfer speed : 10 Gb ).
Any way no problem here.
Thanks again
Francois

[dnanian]

That's why it's an "effective speed"...it includes the effect of Smart Update.