I know nothing about setting up a legit home server. How would

>>56482968
What type of sever do you want to setup? And yes you can raid your existing drives and keep data.

>>56482983
>What type of sever do you want to setup?
I'm not sure what type. It'll mostly be used for me to remotely access my content/share my content with a small group of trusted individuals.

>And yes you can raid your existing drives and keep data.
Sweet. So if I have 10TB of HDD's, all I need to do is buy another 10TB to mirror it? Basically I want the RAID where if a HDD dies, then I can just swap out the dead one and still retain my data.

>>56482968
>How would I get started
Start with Linux+KVM or ESXi, then you can virtualize whatever you want on top of that.
>Cost
Depends on how big you want to start. You can start with a ~5 year old computer and work up from there.
>RAID
Use ZFS if possible

>Is it possible to RAID existing drives and keep the data?
If you are asking this kind of questions, you are nowhere near being able to setup your own server

>>56483085
If that's your intent look at the freeNAS OS.

Also you need to look up different types of raid.