Hey guys, quick question… I have 2 sets of raid 1’s on my qnap… 4 total drives… We use for backups… I want to rebuild the entire qnap with 4 new drives with 1 raid 10… My question is can i just pull these drives out and rebuild so that the data on the current raid sets are not deleted? Not sure I will ever need them but if I have an issue and I need to get data off them can i then just stick the drives back on and build back the raid 1 without formatting or lossing the data on the drives?
If the drives are used for backups, then your data should be somewhere else still (otherwisenit’s not a backup)
Be aware that the drives not only contain the data but also OS and swap partitions(so you cannit simply read those in other machines) so if you need to keep the data safe, back it up (e.g. USB drive) and keep that retained
The QNAP is being used to backup a certain hypervisor, there isnt a backup to the backup if that is what you are asking… And my question was not moving the drives onto another machine… If I needed to could I put them back into the same machine (QNAP) and just rebuild the raid exactly how it was prior and access the data from the pulled drives.
What dolbyman is saying is there is no guarantee as the drives contain the operating system as well. To be sure that the data is saved, export it to a neutral format i.e. external USB drive or other form of backup. Do not count on the NAS being available or the drives working in that environment down the road.