Richard Hector wrote: > I prefer not to get in the situation where I have to shrink a filesystem > though - xfs doesn't support it anyway.
Agreed. Even better is to avoid it. Small ext{3,4} file systems shrink acceptably well. But larger ext{3,4} file systems can take a very long time to shrink. I once made the mistake of trying to shrink a 600G filesystem. The operation was eventually successful. But it took 10 days to complete! And once I started it there was no other option than to let it complete. There are many stories of this from people doing the same thing on the net. It seems that the code for expanding the file system is used often and optimized to run fast but that the code for shrinking it is not used very often and therefore has severe inefficiencies. But if you wait long enough, more than a week in my case, then it will finish successfully. If I ever need to shrink an ext{3,4} file system again I will not shrink it. I will instead create a new file system of the desired size and then copy from the old to the new. That is reliable and will complete in much less time than shrinking an existing file system. Bob
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