Newb Question. Is it possible to backup RAID'd and Mirror'd Drives Externally

[Questor7]

Trying upgrade my DS918+ from 4 TB to 8 TB of storage. I have an external WD 4TB drive attached to the USB 3 on the NAS. Is it possible/practical to remove each drive (2 -2TB raided drives and the 1- 4TB Mirrored drive) and clone them to larger capacity drives using an External dock and cloning software(Acronis). Then to re-install them in the DS918+ and validate that I am now at 2- 4TB drives, raided, at 1 - 8TB drive, mirrored. External USB 4TB to be expanded to a 10TB external USB 3.0 drive... Would this procedure work?

v/r

Questor7

 

[EAZ1964]

Not clear to me what you mean with "raided" (raid 0, 1 ?) and the 1 mirrored disk? Please explain, you will get a better answer if the question is better formulated.

 

[Questor7]

Raided as the 2 - 2TB are striped for performance, Raid 0?, the 4TB drive is Mirrored to the those 2 drives for redundancy/recovery/. As I said Newb here..

 

[EAZ1964]

How do you mirror the two raid0 (striped disks) to the 4TB? Can you share screen prints of your pools and volumes?

The external cloning is not officially supported. I know it can work for RAID1 disks, but have my serious doubts on RAID0.
The recommended way would be to copy all data to external disk (eg using hyper backup) and then restore it to a bigger disk.

 

[Questor7]

Sorry, I haven't touch the config since its inception, it is Raid 5... Just doubling the size of all drives...

 

[Rusty]

If you are already keen on expanding your drives, why do you want to mess with an external disks? Just replace the drives inside your array (one at a time) and let the array upgrade itself to a larger capacity.

 

[Questor7]

Fear of losing all data even with the 3rd Mirrored recovery drive. So the 3rd drive will rebuild the striped array? I was unaware that this could be done. Wow. So, as I remove a drive the 3rd drive will rebuild the striped array. Does the rebuild take place on the 3rd redundant drive if it's increased to 8 TB later?

Again I am really new at using RAIDS...

v/r

Questor7

 

[Rusty]

So the 3rd drive will rebuild the striped array?

You don't have a striped array. You have a RAID5 with 3 drives. So you can swap out one drive at a time and let it rebuild the array back to normal status. Then swap out the next one and so on. Do keep your data backed up just in case.

 

[Questor7]

Learning,, thanks...