How to resize my file system in ubuntu after resizing a droplet?

You’ve probably solved this problem by now, but I had a similar issue and solved it. I created a droplet that was 20gb, then took a snapshot and created a new 30gb droplet from that snapshot. Running df -h on the new droplet still showed 20gb. Tech support linked me to this unanswered question (accidentally) and an article that contained information that mainly applied to resizing additional filesystems (ie, those without the OS), but the main command did the trick for me. Simply run the following command:

sudo resize2fs /dev/disk/by-label/DOROOT

Resize2fs is safe to use on live filesystems with an OS. Here is a note from the resize2fs manual page:

“If the filesystem is mounted, it can be used to expand the size of the mounted filesystem, assuming the kernel and the file system supports on-line resizing. (Modern Linux 2.6 kernels will support on-line resize for filesystems mounted using ext3 and ext4)”

Still, if you’re paranoid about data loss like me, and if you’ve made any changes since spinning up the new droplet, create a snapshot backup for yourself before running resize2fs.

In your specific case, I think the problem was that you were using the disk name instead of the volume name. The volume name and path is what appears when you run df -H, which for me was:

Filesystem                 Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
..
/dev/disk/by-label/DOROOT   22G   12G   10G  55% /
..

Whereas /dev/vda was my disk name, as it appeared in parted.

Hello there,

You can check our article on How to Resize Droplets

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/how-to/resize/

In certain cases, a disk resize fails to resize the Droplet’s partition or filesystem. If you rerun df -h after a disk resize and the output is unchanged, this usually indicates a problem. Use gdisk to get more information:

gdisk -l /dev/vda

The output looks like this:

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.3
Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/vda: 104857600 sectors, 50.0 GiB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): C1E73477-225B-4585-8BB5-C9291E473CE4
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 52428766
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2014 sectors (1007.0 KiB)
Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1          227328        52428766   24.9 GiB    8300

Some operating systems, like CentOS, don’t come with gdisk by default. You can either install gdisk using the package manager (e.g. sudo yum install gdisk) or use fdisk:

fdisk -l /dev/vda

The output looks like this:

Disk /dev/vda: 50.0 GB, 53687091200 bytes, 104857600 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk label type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000b956b

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/vda1   *        2048    52428766    52426718   83  Linux

In both of the above cases, the partition is still 25 GB even though the disk is 50 GB.To resize the partition, use the growpart command. In this command, /dev/vda is the name of the disk, separated by a space, and followed by the number of the partition to resize, 1.

growpart /dev/vda1

The command to resize the filesystem depends on the filesystem type. If you don’t know what filesystem you’re using, check with df:

df -Th /dev/vda1

You can see the filesystem type in the second column of the output. The following example output shows the filesystem type is ext4.

Filesystem     Type  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1      ext4   50G  4.0G   45G  10% /

For ext3/4 filesystems, use resize2fs to resize the filesystem.

resize2fs /dev/vda1

For XFS, use xfs_growfs to resize the filesystem.

xfs_growfs /dev/vda1

Hope that this helps!