Dear all, this is my first post, so hello everybody (I have been a reader of this forum for a long time already without ever registering).

I wanted to have some opinions on my problem:
On my 3 drive RAID 5 (Software RAID with mdadm 3x2TB disks, 12.04 Server), one drive has crashed yesterday (hardware fail, drive is not even recognized any more).
The RAID is degraded but still working.

Is it safer to repair the raid first (replace the missing disk) or back it up on my 4TB backup disk while it is still degraded?
In other words: Is an additional failure more likely during repairing the Raid or during backing up the data in degraded mode?