Hello, long time lurker, first time poster.

Basically, I've got an existing RAID0 array with two 500GB drives, and a spare 1TB drive sitting around that was used for backup. I'm out of space on the array, so I figure this is a good chance to add additional storage, and ditch the risky RAID0 setup (I can never remember to do backups

The RAID0 is currently mounted as my /home, and I want to disassemble the array, add the new drive, and have just a bunch of disks all working together to store my personal files. (This probably doesn't matter, but the array is also encrypted using dm-crypt/LUKS.) What's the best way to go about this? I vaguely know of UnionFS, and aufs2 seems to be the maintained successor, and that looks like a good choice. I also have a little experience with mount --bind with my NFS shares, but I'm not sure if that would really work.

Overall, I want to avoid having multiple partitions on the drives mounted to individual directories, since my /home layout can change pretty quickly now and again, and resizing partitions with data is just a pain. So yeah, any suggestions? Running a fully updated Arch system, BTW.

btrfs. Note my signature.

Never saw the point in encryption. I'm (at least) as paranoid as the next guy, but I've seen enough to know the people I *really* don't want to read my shit already can. No matter what I do.

I run btrfs on several (non prod) systems and haven't had any problems I didn't deliberately cause. Note my signature.

Plug in the new drive, format it, mount it as /home.new. Then copy everything from /home to /home.new. Unmount both /home and /home.new (logged in as root from the console, otherwise /home will be busy). Modify /etc/fstab and mount the new drive as /home.

Partition, format, the other 2 500Gb drives how you want.

I've used btrfs in a vm, and it is way cool. But I haven't convinced myself that it is ready to be used in anger. So I'm going to suggest LVM, and then duck cos it seems not many here get on with it.

Also automate your backup system. I've got mine down to:

1. Plug in backup drive
2. Upon receiving email report, unplug drive

Hey phil, we gunna keep head-butting each other ??? ....

Lots of options, but none will work without you (the OP) copying the data off first. That'll at least make your first backup ...

For the next 12 months or so, most likely!