Data Backup

[ms2004]

Advice please folks...

A couple of years ago I bought a NAS drive, 2 bay plus 2 3TB discs. I arranged it as a JBOD setup and mapped each disc a drive letter. Drive L acts for the files and drive M acts as a backup.

I have now used up all the space, so I was going to buy a 6TB USB drive as my backup and use both discs in the NAS drive to act as a single drive. That way I can get 6TB of space for files.

My question is, can I delete the data on my M drive and then combine both NAS discs into a single drive letter without having to delete the data and copy it back again. I want to combine the 2 nas discs into a single drive with 6 TB capacity and assign it a single drive letter. Id rather not delete everything, change the RAID setup and copy it back again as it takes ages to copy the files over.

Thanks in advance.

 

[motorbiking]

It would depend on your NAS software and its ability to add drives to a volume group. Personally I'd backup to the external drive and rebuild the 2bay NAS and do a copy. If the external drive is USB3 and your NAS has a reasonable controller you should be able to complete the copy in a day or so.

 

[Skyhigh]

I've been in a similar situation, after a lot of digging about, comparing software raid utilities, etc, the best route was (as others have said)
1) Back up separately to a local drive
2) Back up to a cloud service (I already use Crashplan to backup my NAS)
3) Switched to UnRaid