RAID/Disk Transfer

[GeckoBoy84]

Hi there,
I own 2 servers and am attempting to now implement raid on them. However I have a little dilemma. Both servers have data, and I have 2 different sets of disks. Currently both servers have the same disk so I am assuming I would need to move 1 disk from my second server into my first and give the 2 new disks to the second server. Both disks have data that is currently not backed up in any way. I was planning on implementing RAID1. I use Ubuntu Server 20.04 and I have onboard RAID cards I believe (The servers are both Dell R610's).
Any help would be appreciated, thanks

[Kilrah]

If you don't have enough space on one server to hold the data from both you'll need some temporary storage to move things to while you change the setup.

[GeckoBoy84]

3 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

If you don't have enough space on one server to hold the data from both you'll need some temporary storage to move things to while you change the setup.

Currently they are both running 900GB SAS Drives. I now have 2 1tb SAS drives. I also have access to a 512GB external SSD (USB)
Both servers have about 200GB of data.

[Kilrah]

You could move the data of server A to one of the new disks, the data of the server B to the 2nd new disk, put both old disks in server A, restore its data from its copy, then offload the copy of server B onto it since it now has twice the storage, then build server B and restore it from the copy on A...

 

And hopefully make no mistakes since there is no backup, which is very much not recommended.

[GeckoBoy84]

3 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

You could move the data of server A to one of the new disks, the data of the server B to the 2nd new disk, put both old disks in server A, restore its data from its copy, then offload the copy of server B onto it since it now has twice the storage, then build server B and restore it from the copy on A...

 

And hopefully make no mistakes since there is no backup, which is very much not recommended.

How would I go about copying the disks? Is there an easy command to do?

Never used RAID before, so unsure on how I would set it up for Ubuntu Server 20.04

[Kilrah]

I would connect the temporary destination disk then boot off a live USB drive and make a drive image from the system disk onto the destination one. Do that on both, then put both old drives in the first server, set up the RAID volume (you need to figure that out in your BIOS/RAID card's interface), then boot off the live key again and restore the image from the temp drive to the new RAID.

[Helly]

am i not understanding this right or are you just thinking way to complicated about this... pull the disc from server 2, install the new discs, create the raid. Connect the disc you pulled to server 1 and copy everything over to server 2. Then just wipe the first server and create the raid. Then copy everything back....

If you don't have back ups then this would be the easiest, safest and fastest way to get everything up and running the way you want it to. Unless i miss something here. Why are people so against reinstalling an OS these days?