Data Robotics has announced integration of Drobo FS (http://www.drobo.com/drobo-fs), the Drobo designed for expandable file sharing, and Apple's Time Machine, an automated backup solution. The new Drobo FS with Time Machine integration offers Mac users a highly efficient and scalable shared storage and backup solution, according to Mark Fuccio, senior director of products and markets at Data Robotics.

Drobo FS users are now able to pre-define a limit on how much storage will be used for Time Machine backups. Previously, Time Machine would consume capacity until it was gone and then delete the oldest backups to make room for new backups. The Drobo FS platform enables multiple Mac users on a network to automatically and simultaneously back up to the same Drobo FS.

Powering Drobo FS is a dual core microprocessor: one core runs Drobo’s BeyondRAID code, while the other core runs an embedded Linux server for file sharing and running DroboApps from third party developers. Data Robotics has enhanced the source code for Netatalk, an open source implementation of AFP (“Apple File Protocol”) to support Time Machine by controlling the amount of disk space used for backups. Data Robotics has donated source code for its enhancements to the project. These are available in Netatalk 2.05, or later, for all developers and users.