Re: expand UFS partition

On Thu, Nov 16, 2023 at 09:52:19AM -0800, Jim Pazarena wrote:

>I have a UFS which is near full, and I know there is 
>spare/un-allocated space on the hard drive.
>I can not back it up first , as it is both huge and very busy.

If you care about the data, then you should back it up, both before 
this change and ongoing.

You can take a snapshot of the filesystem, and then back up that 
snapshot while the server runs and modifies the live filesystem.  Dump 
can do that automatically with "dump -L" (see the man page).  Or, if 
that automatic snapshot is not enough to guarantee that the data is in 
a consistent state, you could bring the server down briefly to stop the 
filesystem action, take a snapshot manually, restart the server, and 
back up the snapshot while the system runs.

Whatever you do, as you say, it would be good to test it on a spare 
server first, before messing with the live system.

I suggest that you read relevant parts of the FreeBSD Handbook, 
including the chapter "Storage".

<https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/>