The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/elperrosapo on 2024-12-30 05:36:17.

Long story short, I’ve been running a Jellyfin server this year, first time running a home server in general. I initially set it up on an old iMac, which died one night while I was sleeping out of nowhere (suspect it might be the PSU), so I had to scramble and set it on my Macbook which has been docked/clamshell for a little over a month now.

I needed a solution, so I bought an Alder Lake mini pc with an Intel N100, and I just installed Ubuntu on it (I don’t wanna deal with a headless distro, it’s my first time running linux properly, also my family might have to get on it if I’m not here to fiddle with Jellyfin).

I will look into migrating my Jellyfin install from one OS to another, if that is even possible, in order to keep users, watch history, collections, etc. My other issue, which is the main reason for this post:

All my content is stored in 2 Seagate Ironwolf Pro HDDs, which are inside a JBOD USB enclosure, they are 8tb and 16tb respectively. They are formatted as HFS+ cause Mac, and I need to re-format to Ext4 I suppose.

There is no budget to buy additional drives to do a local backup, so what would my best option be?

I had an idea, that since neither of them are halfway full, I might be able to set up an Ext4 partition in each, copying all the contents from the original partition, and then deleting it just keeping the new one. Is this even possible? Is it recommendable?

My other option would be to fit everything in the 8tb drive, I have an external SSD to spare as well, just to empty the 16tb and format it; then transfer all to that one and format the 8tb, to finally re-organize the files how I originally distributed then among the two.

Please advice on these two methods, maybe I’m missing a simpler one.