Drobo has gone through several problems over the past few years, and they’ve caused a multitude of them for photographers. To catch you up, the company is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which protects them from creditors. They’ve also stated they are not guaranteeing that their products will work with the next Mac OS system. With each iteration, photographers have had issues with their Drobo devices that eventually got fixed. But this one might be a massive problem.
First off, if you’re a Drobo user, then you know that you can’t take the drives out of the unit and put them into some other RAID unit, which is pretty simple to do with other brands. With that said, Drobo is using proprietary technology to hold your data hostage. If you want it offloaded, you need to pay a lot of extra money.
Drobo was a household name for photographers for years thanks to Scott Kelby and others who championed just how easy their drives were to use. But the rest of the industry has since caught up and arguably surpassed Drobo here.
It’s like putting all your money into a bank and then having to pay money to withdraw your money and leave the bank. Photographers across the world have used Drobo devices for years. So for lots of us, all our data is in this one spot. And very soon, it won’t be available for you to use at all unless you spend a whole lot more money to offload and go to a new system.
So what would a class action lawsuit do? Well, it would hopefully put pressure on Drobo to make it easier for photographers to move all their data. For example, something could be done to make the data available so that the drives can be put into another case from another brand with ease. What I sincerely hope is that the photographers don’t receive some frivolous payout. Instead, offer photographers some sort of update to their Drobo that will allow them to use the drives in another case from say SanDisk, Synology, or somewhere else.
Look at it this way, not every photographer can truly afford to just buy a new case and a ton of hard drives immediately to offload all their data. And as it is, what about the current investment that they’ve made with Drobo? Why should that need to be negated at all?
Alternatively, it could also just force Drobo to make their products compatible with the latest Mac OS software. I mean, honestly, why couldn’t they just do that? It would end up costing them the least amount of money and would also ensure that photographers continue to be happy. Further, it would be a final warning for all photographers to get off of Drobo.
When the new Apple OS comes out, what will happen to Drobo users? Will they just stay on the older system? I wouldn’t be surprised, quite frankly. I know lots of folks who are many operating systems behind and haven’t updated their computers for many generations. Contrary to what people think, all photographers aren’t very technical. A lot of them barely know how to sell their own products and services. Instead, they’re really into their own art. What’s going to make you think they’ll know what to do when their archives suddenly stop working?
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