[cbrandt]

After using SD for years on external drives I have just purchased the new Drobo 5N (a network set of drives similar to Drobo FS).

I have searched the discussion threads and most of the posts predate Mountain Lion and even the Drobo FS let alone the new Drobo 5N. So I want to know what is your recommendation now for using a networked drobo for SD backups.

I have an imac, a macbook pro and a macbook air and lately have been doing sparse image backups to a usb drive attached to a time capsule for the laptops and a direct backup to the external drive attached to the imac. I have had a terrible time over the years keeping any drive not directly attached to a laptop mounted for regular SD backups. You have worked with me several times with this problem and nothing has worked so far. I would have preferred to use external drives for the laptop backups attached by firewire to the imac but that almost never worked. Luckily I found that the usb drives attached to the time capsule worked more often.

So since others have been able to use the Drobo FS this way (of course with hacks) I am going to try it using the new Drobo 5N. My question is how to set up the drobo for the backups. Since Drobo had me set up a separate share for Time Machine Backups, I wondered if I should do the same for SD backup sparse image files with a separate share for each computer's backup. I assume that I could limit the share size to the size of the laptop drive. Is this necessary or should I just create the sparse image files as just individual files in a large share?

I will also occasionally make a SD backup to a portable 2.5" external disk but I still want regular backups to occur automatically.