Drobo is Officially Done as the Company Moves Into Liquidation
Drobo, once a darling of the photography world, is officially no more. Following a filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year, the company was unable to emerge from that situation and is now in liquidation.
The brand is actually a subset of parent company StorCentric which filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy after failing to find a buyer or reorganize after — as mentioned, it filed for Chapter 11 last year — Apple Insider reports. The company had tried to sell assets last year, but has failed to secure financing.
Apple Insider notes that companies that file for Chapter 7 will often attempt to sell their assets piecemeal in order to pay off debts. In a word, liquidate. It is, therefore, still possible that the Drobo brand could be picked up and relaunched in the future, though nothing is certain on that front.
While there is no publicly available information at the time of publication, Drobo has confirmed that its products are no longer available.
“As of January 27th, 2023, Drobo support and products are no longer available,” the company writes on its website.
“Drobo support has transitioned to a self-service model. The knowledge base, documentation repository, and legacy documentation library are still accessible for your support needs. We thank you for being a Drobo customer and entrusting us with your data.”
Drobo was one of the earliest names in both direct and network-attached storage (NAS), after it launched its original product, the storage robot, in 2007. It was particularly popular among photographer for the better part of a decade.
The company offered some helpful features, such as the ability to swap hard drives without the need to manually migrate data. It ran BeyondRAID technology that offers faster reads and writes than a single hard drive can achieve. If one drive failed, the user did not lose access to their data since Drobo spread the files across multiple drives.
There were issues, though. Drobo users often reported hardware and software failures and big-name photographers openly cut ties with the brand over these issues.
As the brand and its parent company are very likely shutting down, there is not telling how long these resources will remain available. PetaPixel recommends any Drobo users who wish to maintain their devices should download these files and keep them locally to maintain access to the information should StorCentric or Drobo turn their servers off.
Drobo had been struggling for years. The company had listed multiple products that were sold between 2009 and 2017 as no longer supported back in 2019 and everything from the Gen 1 device that was first put to market in 2009 through the Drobo 5N that ceased being sold in 2017 are all no longer warrantied.
