Selfhosted

39435 readers

1 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Make a raid 5 with two almost full disk and another one empty (lemm.ee)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

41 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I will say it three times, Raid isn't a backup

Raid isn't a backup

Seriously though it shouldn't give much peace of mind. All raid does is add a little resistance to hardware failures. If you mistakingly delete files you are hosed. If your hardware causes corruption you are hosed. If something happens to your computer such a physical abuse your drives are likely going to be damaged which will also mean that you may be hosed. If one drive dies and then the other drives dies before you move your data over you are also hosed.

The big take away is that Raid only really buys time. It can prevent downtime but it will not save you.