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Upgrade & reinstallation 1 min read

Growing partition and file system after a storage upgrade

With a storage upgrade we enlarge the virtual disk while the server is running. The partition and the file system in your server initially stay the same size. Check the current state with these commands:

bash 
lsblk
df -h /

Linux: automatically at the next reboot

Our Linux images contain cloud-init. It grows the root partition and the file system to the full size automatically at the next reboot - we have tested this with Debian 13, Ubuntu 26.04, Rocky Linux 9, AlmaLinux 9 and openSUSE Leap 16. Restart the server once (reboot) and check afterwards with df -h /. While running, without a restart, the file system initially keeps its old size.

Linux: manually while running

If you do not want to restart or nothing has changed, grow partition and file system yourself. In the example the system is on /dev/vda1. Depending on the server the disk may also be called /dev/sda, and with AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux and openSUSE the root partition is not the first one - lsblk shows the disk name and partition number:

bash 
# Partition vergrößern (Paket cloud-guest-utils bzw. cloud-utils-growpart)
growpart /dev/vda 1

# Dateisystem vergrößern - je nach Dateisystem:
resize2fs /dev/vda1      # ext4 (z. B. Debian, Ubuntu)
xfs_growfs /             # XFS (z. B. AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CentOS Stream, openSUSE Leap)

df -T / shows which file system you use. With Btrfs you grow the file system with btrfs filesystem resize max /.

FreeBSD

On FreeBSD the file system does not grow by itself after an extension. Run once as root:

bash 
service growfs onestart

Back up first

Create a snapshot before changing partitions. A typo in the disk or partition number can cost data.

Does this also apply after a restore from backup?
Yes. If the disk is larger today than at the time of the backup, grow the partition the same way after the restore.
I installed my own system via ISO.
Then the procedure depends on your partitioning (for example LVM). First grow the partition or the physical volume, then the logical volume and finally the file system.

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