New unRAID install with existing drives

[schilling3003]

My trial is almost up and I am ready to purchase a full license, but I have I am not sure how to proceed. I messed up some stuff with this install and I would prefer to start from scratch, but I don't want to lose all the data on my drives. How can I migrate the data drives to a new install without losing any data? I don't mind if I have to rebuild the parity drive, but I definitely don't want to lose the data on my data drives.

[schilling3003]

After modifying my search terms and searching for what to do for a USB failure I think I have found my solution. As long as I assign the drives the same as my current install unRAID should recognize them and work just fine. I am nervous about losing my data, so I would still welcome any advice on this.

[JorgeB]

7 hours ago, schilling3003 said:

As long as I assign the drives the same as my current install unRAID should recognize them and work just fine.

Correct, if parity is valid you can check that and avoid a parity sync, but still do a parity check.

[pwm]

22 hours ago, schilling3003 said:

After modifying my search terms and searching for what to do for a USB failure I think I have found my solution. As long as I assign the drives the same as my current install unRAID should recognize them and work just fine. I am nervous about losing my data, so I would still welcome any advice on this.

 

One important thing to remember is that if the unRAID machine fails, you can still take out the disks and connect to any Linux machine and read out the files. So as long as the the data disks are in working conditions and the file systems haven't broken the files on the disks can be read out.

 

The only reason to not connect unRAID disks to another machine is that if you mount any of the file systems read/write, then you will introduce changes to the file system that would affect the validity of the parity data. So taking disks and connect to some other machine is something to avoid unless it's your last option.