I did know that, but had I really ‘groked’ ¹ it?

I updated my Mac Mini to MacOS 10.13.3 overnight and all seemed well. Unfortunately, my Drobo was thereafter, completely empty. I tried everything ². No, the data was gone.³

I did have an ace up my sleeve ⁴. I had subscribed to a Backblaze account.

All 5+ Terabytes of my data were backed up to the cloud. Now to get them back.

Boy is this slow (but it works)

The process was helped by my picture library held as backup on a removable hard drive (only 1 month out of date), My movies on another drive with my TV programs

All the files are back (aside from some Movies , which I have backed up elsewhere).

I have also gone back to Superduper and implemented a set of local backup discs – MacMini daily backup, Drobo files, weekly

Phew!

1. I first met this word in A Clockwork Orange. It comes from Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein in 1961 (I read this so long ago that I have little memory of the story) ↩
2. removing and replacing a disc drive, checking for errors etc etc. ↩
3. The Drobo will protect against 1 or even 2 hard drives failing, but not protect against a software glitch that overwrites your index.

   It’s a fast and handy large storage system, but it is definitely not a backup solution ↩

4. Wellington also had an ace up his sleeve. He had kept Waterloo in his pocket as a possible future site for battle. He needed this ↩