Is it safe to expand the size of a volume while it's in use?

Hello, @lwschris

If you need more storage space than your current volume provides, you can attach additional volumes to the same Droplet or expand the size of a current volume.

Increasing the size of a volume has two steps:

1. Resize the volume to make its disk larger.
2. Expand the filesystem on the volume to use the new space.

Considerations Before Resizing

• You cannot decrease the size of a volume. In other words, volume resizes are irreversible.

Data is not always sequentially written in memory, so reducing the available space would risk data loss and filesystem corruption. To decrease the size of a volume, create a smaller volume and transfer the contents of an existing volume to it using a tool like rsync.

• We strongly recommend taking a snapshot of the volume before resizing.

Any changes to a filesystem can lead to data loss if something goes wrong. We strongly recommend backing up the volume’s data before resizing. If you use snapshots, you can delete the snapshot after confirming that the resize was successful.

You can check out tutorial on how to increase the size of a block storage volume:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/volumes/how-to/increase-size/#resize-the-volume

Hope that this helps!

Regards, Alex