A difficult filesystem

[Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker]

On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 13:30 +0100, Andy Armstrong wrote:
> I have an rsync based backup regime that results in a filesystem  
> containing lots of inodes many of which have as many as fifty hard  
> links pointing to them. I'm not sure how many files there are in  
> total - the little script I have analysing it has been running all  
> night and is up to 26,000,000 plus. debugfs tells me there are a  
> shade over 6,000,000 inodes.
> 
> I want to migrate the whole (ext3) filesystem onto another, larger  
> device.
> 
> Any of the normal hard-link-preserving copying methods run out of  
> memory pretty early - for obvious reasons.
> 
> So I copied the whole filesystem (dd if=x of=y) onto the new device  
> with a view to growing it in place. Unfortunately parted deosn't like  
> it either - "You found a bug in GNU Parted".
[...]
> While I'm waiting does anyone have tips for other tools that might be  
> useful?

Try resize2fs. It requires an fsck -f first, though, to make sure the
filesystem is fully consistent, which is obviously going to take ages
with that number of inodes and dentries.

-- 
ilmari