Administering filesystems

Adding disk space and restructuring filesystems

A chronic shortage of space usually results from having more users on the system than the current hard disk can reasonably handle, or simply having too many directories or files. In either case, creating a new filesystem on a new hard disk allows you to transfer some of the users and directories from the primary hard disk to the new location, freeing a significant amount of space on the existing filesystem and improving system operation.

If free space is chronically low on your system, you might want to expand your system storage capacity by installing additional hard disks. See ``Adding hard disks''. Once you install the new hard disk and create new filesystems, you can use the free space in the new filesystem for new work, or you can copy existing user or system directories to it.

If one filesystem is full and other filesystems have a significant amount of free space (or there is additional unused space on the hard disk), you can change the layout on the primary disk to take advantage of the free space. However, this procedure is not as simple as adding a second hard disk.

To change the number of filesystems on your hard disk or to reapportion the disk space among the filesystems:

Create a complete backup of each filesystem on your system. See ``Running unscheduled filesystem backups''.
WARNING: Be certain that you have a complete, accurate, and readable backup for each filesystem before you continue or you may lose your files.
Reinstall your system as described in ``The installation and upgrade procedure''.
NOTE: Make sure you select customization of your hard disk layout and redistributon of disk space among the filesystems.
Restore the data from the filesystem backups. See ``Restoring files or directories from backup media''.