Post #996794

2026-04-07 13:32 UTC

I want to combine my home server&#39;s drives to a single pool. I added two new drives last week and used LVM to combine them, but I just learned that if one drive on a logical volume fails, you can lose all your data. I see mergerFS can also be used to pool drives, and it seems like a drive failure is just a drive failure with that setup, but I can&#39;t find a straight answer on that. I plan on having a separate backup eventually anyway, but I&#39;d rather only replace one failed drive, instead of rebuilding all the drives on a failed LVM setup. Does a single failed drive affect the whole system on mergerFS? I don&#39;t want to bother with raid, I&#39;m not that experienced, I just want to add new drives to my home server now and then.

Replies (3)

@Puffin@squawk.social 2026-04-07 13:42

@CheetahFluff mergeFS work by creating a virtual disk, so if a disk isn't there you will have some file/directory that might be missing but the rest will continue working. It very cool project use it personally with ssd/hdd combination for media as a form of manual tiered storage. from the doc of the project : - Ability to add or remove filesystems/paths without impacting the rest of the data - Unaffected by individual filesystem failure

Open ##996802
@jackemled@furry.engineer 2026-04-07 15:48

@CheetahFluff You might like OpenZFS or BTRFS. You can really only do this kind of thing & have 100% of your data safe if a disk fails by having a RAID with parity or a mirror setup. Both BTRFS & OpenZFS make it very easy though. After that it should work on its own without you needing to touch it, except to use a command to make it accept a replacement disk when needed. Remember that a mirror or parity disk isn't equivalent to a backup though. It just makes it less likely that you'll need to restore a backup, so you still need a separate backup. Both BTRFS & OpenZFS have a "send" function that you can use to send a complete filesystem backup to a remote server or another pool on the same device, & it's good for backups.

Open ##996804
@CheetahFluff@nyan.network 2026-04-07 17:30

I undid all the lvm stuff that I set up a few days ago. It took an hour to troubleshoot and take down. Set up mergerFS in five minutes and all my containers work with it without changing any configurations, and without any data loss or even data movement. 10 out of bloody 10, can recommend.

Open ##996805