Should I use another hard disk to avoid having no space left on the device?

[Ahmed1Elsawy]

Hello all,

I have a 13.8GB partition followed by a 20.7GB partition mounted as /home this one has some free space - but I have another disk drive which is 320 GB and actually it has a plenty of free space, so I cannot figure out which solution would be the correct choice should I resize the 13.8GB partition and move the 20.7GB to another place or should I mount some folders to another hard drive and this actually appeals to me can I save the configuration of the system and the applications to an external hard drive? I want the experts to help me …

[I_A]

@Ahmed1Elsawy

Hello all,

I have a 13.8GB partition followed by a 20.7GB partition mounted as /home this one has some free space - but I have another disk drive which is 320 GB and actually it has a plenty of free space, so I cannot figure out which solution would be the correct choice should I resize the 13.8GB partition and move the 20.7GB to another place or should I mount some folders to another hard drive and this actually appeals to me can I save the configuration of the system and the applications to an external hard drive? I want the experts to help me …

you’re going to have to reformat (maybe)
13.8 is too little for btrfs but it’s enough for ext4/xfs, if you have btrfs reformat and give it more size (the minimum recommended for btrfs is 40GB) if you reformat with ext4 you can use the 13.8 and won’t need the extra disk
read-up on btrfs here
https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles-12/stor_admin/data/sec_filesystems_major.html
it’s a sle document but the part about btrfs is more or less the same.

ps. btrfs is a cool file system and the future, but I don’t use it I still prefer ext4

[brunomcl]

@I_A

you’re going to have to reformat (maybe)
13.8 is too little for btrfs but it’s enough for ext4/xfs, if you have btrfs reformat and give it more size (the minimum recommended for btrfs is 40GB) if you reformat with ext4 you can use the 13.8 and won’t need the extra disk
read-up on btrfs here
https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles-12/stor_admin/data/sec_filesystems_major.html
it’s a sle document but the part about btrfs is more or less the same.

ps. btrfs is a cool file system and the future, but I don’t use it I still prefer ext4

If you don’t want to reformat, and if your current /home partition is physically right after your / (root) partition, what I’d do is:

• Create a new partition for /home in the larger disk
• Copy everything in /home to the new partition, including hidden files (files starting with a dot in the name). When you do this you get some warnings regarding pipe and, IANM, fifo files, that you can disregard, i.e., don’t need to copy as they’ll be recreated.
• Change fstab to point to the new /home
• Reboot to a liveCD with gparted
• Delete the old, small /home partition
• Extend the / (root) partition over the deleted partition, without reformatting.

Your root partition should go from 13.8 to 34.5 GB, possibly not too small to have snapshots in BTRFS.
For an ext4 root partition, it’s my experience that 20 GB is usually enough - my current work/play box 20GB / is 14GB full.

[obel1x]

I agree to the solution of brunomcl
A few things to be aware of: Be sure to work as user “root” for copy of files in home. Otherwise you may not be able to access some files.
and 2nd use option: prereserve attributes. So that every copied file will get the same owner it was before and not owner root.

I don’t know if e.g. dolphin can do this. I personally would use “mc” (Midnight Commender).

[knurpht]

@obel1x

I agree to the solution of brunomcl
A few things to be aware of: Be sure to work as user “root” for copy of files in home. Otherwise you may not be able to access some files.
and 2nd use option: prereserve attributes. So that every copied file will get the same owner it was before and not owner root.

I don’t know if e.g. dolphin can do this. I personally would use “mc” (Midnight Commender).

Here’s how it’s done from CLI, assuming /home is the mountpoint for the old partition, /newhome the one for the new partition:

cp -r -v -p /home/* /newhome/

The -r being for recursive, -v for verbose, -p for preserve ( attributes ).

[whonea]

I A wrote:

> 13.8 is too little for btrfs but it’s enough for ext4/xfs, if you have
> btrfs reformat and give it more size (the minimum recommended for btrfs
> is 40GB) if you reformat with ext4 you can use the 13.8 and won’t need
> the extra disk

I figure on 20GB for the system - just as a rule of thumb. I have several
folks I support with older machines that are 32 bit with relatively small
disks. That means using 13.2 or 13.1 with EXT4 and I discard old kernels
after kernel updates but it’s still easy to run out of disk space if I wait
a couple of weeks to apply updates with anything under 20GB for the system.

[I_A]

@whonea

I A wrote:

> 13.8 is too little for btrfs but it’s enough for ext4/xfs, if you have
> btrfs reformat and give it more size (the minimum recommended for btrfs
> is 40GB) if you reformat with ext4 you can use the 13.8 and won’t need
> the extra disk

I figure on 20GB for the system - just as a rule of thumb. I have several
folks I support with older machines that are 32 bit with relatively small
disks. That means using 13.2 or 13.1 with EXT4 and I discard old kernels
after kernel updates but it’s still easy to run out of disk space if I wait
a couple of weeks to apply updates with anything under 20GB for the system.

my setup uses 20GB for / and I have no issues with LEAP, as updates replace installed files and I don’t cache them, I think the default is for the system to store only 3 kernels so that’s not a real issue, my root uses around 10GB with plasma 5.6 and lxqt 0.10 (currently not working with Qt 5.6), I could install the full Gnome and still have a few GB to spare, but I don’t use btrfs.