Hello,

I am going to upgrade my server, taking advantage of the fact that I am going to be able to put more hard disks, I wanted to take advantage of this to give a little more security (against loss) to my data.

Currently I have 2 hard drives in ext4 with information, and wanted to buy a third (same capacity all three) and place them in raid5, so that in the future, I can put more hard drives and increase the capacity.

Due to economic issues, right now I can only buy what would be the third disk, so it is impossible for me to back up the data I currently have.

The data itself is not valuable, in case any file gets corrupted, I could download it again, however there are enough teras (20) to make downloading everything a madness.

In principle I thought to put on this server (PC) a dietpi, a trimmed debian and maybe with mdadm make the raid. I have seen tutorials on how to do it (this for example https://ruan.dev/blog/2022/06/29/create-a-raid5-array-with-mdadm-on-linux ).

The question is, is there any way without having to format the hard drives with data?

Thank you and sorry for any mistakes I may make, English is not my mother language.

EDIT:

Thanks for yours answers!! I have several paths to investigate.

  • @just_another_personEnglish
    2•7 months ago

    Ahhh, makes sense. That kind of wrecked my brain for a moment.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•7 months ago

      Lol, sorry, I really tried to make it clear what I was doing, honest, I did! 😄

      Yes, I have 3 local devices that replicate to each other, one is RAID5, (well, 2 are, but…not for long). And one of them also does backup to a cloud storage.

      Not ideal, because 3 devices are colocated, but it’s what I can do right now. I’m working on a backup solution to include friends and family locations (looking to replicate what Crashplan used to provide in their “backup to friends” solution).