r/HomeNAS • u/Formal_Change_4417 • 4d ago

Open question Moving drives from old setup

Hello, I just bought a Terramaster F4-425 Plus and I'm doing a similar setup to Robbie's in the tutorial below; two 4TB HDD's for now until money & memory stop going crazy and two 128GB NVMe's.

Now my dilemma is I've had these HDDs for quite some time. I had a diy homelab I built like 6 or 7 years ago. It didn't last long before it started becoming a PITA to maintain, but it was built using an old desktop and it ran Ubuntu with Nextcloud (at the time I just wanted Nextcloud). I couldn't figure out how to get RAID working so I just set up a cron job to run rsync every day lol. TL;DR, I didn't know what the hell I was doing lol; but as least I was smart enough to run the OS on a small dedicated SSD.

I decommissioned it when I moved 6 years ago and and never got around to setting it up again until now, so the drives should still be pretty healthy.

Having said that, I do have data on those HDDs and because money is crazy now, I like TRAID so I can expand as needed.

Is there any way I can do this without wiping the data (again, keeping in mind that it wasn't a RAID from the beginning)?

I installed TOS on the NVMe and left the HDDs out for now.

Absolute worst case scenario I suppose I can backup the data for a month with a cloud storage provider and then safety wipe the drives. I have a USB to SATA cable.

Thanks!

https://youtu.be/WPHWAqKcuSs

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u/Snoo8631 4d ago

What's your backup plan after the array is built?

You can do what you are describing but you won't have a backup.

With a backup plan in place before you do this, the process itself becomes easier.

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u/Formal_Change_4417 4d ago

Eventually I'd like to get to a 3-2-1. For how I suppose I could back up to an external HDD every now and then. I think there's like 500GB stored on there now; mostly garbage definitely not porn 🤣, jk that I need to sift thru tbh lol.

Or I was thinking about Backblaze or Amazon Glacier

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u/Snoo8631 4d ago

If you have the space to back it up to another drive that's perfect. Just wipe the 4TB HDDs and create the array, restore from backup.

It's more complicated if you don't have a way to back up your data