Upgrade mycloud to mycloud mirror or mycloud ex

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
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Hi all, my 4TB drive is about hald full now but I’ve suddenly come over paranoid that I haven’t back any of it up at all, I was wondering if it was possible to open it up and take the hdd and put it into one of the bigger storage units, then I would be able to back everything up and get more space at the same time!

Thanks in advance! 

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hello craigyy

Since I signed in to answer another post about backup, I might as well answer your post. 

If the 4TB drive contains your only copy I would not take apart the drive to be inserted into another unit to be expanded.

What I would suggest that you do is to buy a WD 4TB USB drive and copy all the My Cloud files onto the new 4TB usb using the usb on the computer. Once that is done, you can then attach the 4TB USB drive to your Cloud unit and then you are able to access both devices; one is a backup of the cloud.

Just remember to copy your files to both devices, this won’t be automatic but at least you will have a backup. If you want something automatic, search the forum for rsync however I think it is a lot faster and safer if you do it manually.

edit: So after signing out and thinking about your original question, I realize that I did not answer your question.

A EX my cloud requires two drives, both empty so they can be formatted together. You cannot insert one drive full of data and expect the unit to mirror the first drive to the second; unless WD has created software to do this but I would not trust my only copy to be replicated in this manner.  Most/All NAS devices requires both drives to be empty so they can be synced on a track by track mirroring. When one drive fails you are prompted to remove the failed drive and insert a new one that is an exact same size or bigger as the old one and the mirroring begins again.

I know the thought process of inserting a single drive to be mirrored to larger drive, then expanding it by replacing the smaller drive. Unfortunately, unless it is a drobo device that has this capability built into the device itself, most NAS including WD are limited in their mirroring ability.

For myself, even when asked to replace the faulty drive on a faulty mirror set, since I only have the one copy now, I prefer to replace the drives with two new drives and perhaps larger set of hard drives and then copying the original data over.