Nah.

Live images have the image, and free space. Anything you install while they’re on uses that free space, and when you turn them off, they still have an untouched OS partition. The space you used to install things gets wiped, essentially.

But you CAN use that space, Linux works as it normally would, just on a USB. Steam could even download a cloud save and upload after you’ve played, as long as you don’t restart the computer.

First thing it did was overwrite the partition table and everything else with that, to make its own, since it could disregard all the existing data.

I agree with the other commenter, commercial recovery, if the data was that crucial.

I haven’t used raidz but a quick search tells me it supports single-drive expansion.

Maybe reconfigure your raidz as a 2-drive system, then copy over all your data into it, and expand it back into a 3-drive system after.

Probably a habit from when they really did have bad English, but they learned, and surpassed the average american at this point.

Just wanna throw in a voice saying your setup sounds completely fine to me. Maybe it’s a bit odd but it also sounds like how I’d do it if I had storage needs that large.

My current storage needs are currently met with a 2.5" SSD connected to a raspberry pi shared with samba over WiFi though so I’m pretty sure every storage nerd in here is gonna tell me my opinion doesn’t count, take it with a grain of salt.