aBe_FX35

I have only been using DrivePool for a short period, but if I understand your situation, you should be able to open the DrivePool UI and click on the "Remove" drive for the drives you no longer want in the pool. I have done this in DrivePool and it did a good job in transferring the files from the "remove" drive to the other pool drives. However, given nowadays we have large HDDs in our pools, the process takes a long time. Patience is a virtue.
Another option is to simply view the hidden files on those HDDs you no long want to keep in DrivePool, and then copy them all over to the one drive you want to consolidate all your information. Once you verify all your files have been successfully reassembled on that one drive, you could go back and format those other drives. The main advantage I see with using DrivePool is that the files are written to the HDD as standard NTFS files, and if you decided to leave the DrivePool environment, all those files are still accessible by simply viewing the hidden directory.
I am coming from the Windows Storage Space system where bits and pieces of files are written to the HDDs in the pool. When things go bad with Storage Spaces, there is no way to reassemble the broken files spread across a number of HDDs. At least with DrivePool, the entire file is written to a HDD as a standard file, so in theory you should be able to copy those files from the pool HDDs over to one HDD and have a complete directory. I used the Duplication feature of DrivePool for important directories.
Again, I am still learning the benefits of DrivePool over Storage Spaces, but so far, I think DrivePool has the advantage of recovering data from a catastrophic failure whereas I lost all my data in Storage Spaces. If there is a better to transfer your DrivePool files to 1 HDD, I would like to know for my benefit as well.

That's a personal opinion.
Mine is "no".  It's better to have duplication.  And backup. 
Duplication protects against drive failure, backup protects against deletion and loss.  The difference is that backups are incremental and don't contain all changes.
And recovery is MUCH easier with duplication.  
And as somebody that has lost a good number of drives... you may be able to get the data back, but doing so is a PAIN. 
 
In the immediate, no.  But as above ....
 

Hello all,
 
I am just coming here to get specific instructions on how to safely and relatively easily format my current PLEX Media server PC, which i use Stable bit DRIVE POOL and Scanner on that main machine to monitor my Western digital RED HDDs 4TB (x4 in a drivepool using Stablebit). Long story short that pc is acting very very weird,slow, not loading half the time, and its freaking me out because my entire media collection are on those drives/pc. Seems that the motherboard and pc do not fully work right with Windows 10, so i guess i have no other choice but to format entire windows Drive (C: ONLY) and put windows 7 Ultimate on it, that way it will be more stable with windows 7 drivers, windows 10 hardly has any drivers for my old motherboard. (PC is about 6 years old, new gpu, and WD HDD's). hopefully RDP will be compatible between win 7 and my other win 10 machine ? but thats another issue for another day.
 
I need to safely protect my data, and do a fresh install of windows 7 ultimate 64 bit, how do i do this without losing my data or causing issues, hopefully i can re-install everything back with ease, (stablebit, plex server) etc. i want the drives and letters are exactly the same.
 
I would like to get the exact same setup except installed on win 7. 
 
Thanks
 
PS: side note, i have an external HDD for backup purposes, how do i backup my media to it, without creating duplicates (some of the files already exist on there, i just have not updated my collection to the backup hard drive in a while so i dont know where im at, and dont want to waste space by trying to manually trying to put only the new media on there. (would take ages to figure out).