I know this has been raised before, but I want to chack a few details.
Currently NV+ with 4x500MB drives , 4.1.7 There several shares - Media;Common;backup and three user shares
1) I have bought 4x2TB Seagraves from the HCL. One of them is currently on the front USB having been formatted to ext3, and I'm doing a full backup from C:
I then plan to 2)backup my config to a Win7 machine. 3)remove 500MB drives, and add 3 2TBs and do a factory setup 4)copy config back from Win7
Then life looks a bit tricky....
5) I want to copy the backup from the USB drive back to the NAS BUT a) there's no obvious way to do this b) I can only see one of the user shares (mine) and I'm not sure how to restore the others
6) If it all goes wrong, can I put the 500MB disks back, or will the effect of the factory reset be to scrub them?
7) Once everything is working with three disks, I'll move the fourth drive from the USB carrier to the array.
If you remove the 4x500GB drives while the NV+ is off after doing a normal shutdown, then yes, they can be simply returned to the NV+ (while off) and then the NV+ booted. There will have been no changes.
I am not sure about the ext3 and back ups via USB since I have not done that. I have, however, backed up to an external drive connected to my PC and formatted in NTSF. (NTSF format is very slow when connected directly to the NV+, but not when connected to a PC). I then simply copy each share onto the external drive using copy paste. (Setting up a separate folder for each share).
This does take a little more effort, but you can see the files when they are copied. When the NV+ is up and running on 3x2TB drives, you simply copy/paste back onto the NV+.
Until you actually need the 2TB as additional storage on the NV+, I would keep it in service as a backup doing periodic backups.
