Question

Is that Possible to Increase my /Var without loosing my data in it With a Block Storage Volume

I Would like to increase my /Var which contains my Web site data and Database data already in it. is that possible to increase my /var with a Block Storage Volume WITHOUT LOOSING THE DATA ALREADY IN IT. if so . Kindly Explain the Same

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Sandesh Kotian
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
• December 30, 2020
Accepted Answer

Hey Sandy!

This is a bit complicated task! However, it is not impossible to accomplish it. I have managed to mount a block-storage volume to /var/ directory of my Droplet without apparent issues. However, with that being said, I highly recommend you to take snapshots of your Droplet and make sure you have local backups(downloaded from Droplet via SFTP or RSYNC or SCP). Here is what I did:

  1. Create a new volume of 10GB(you can choose any size) .

  2. When you are adding the volume, enter the volume name(in my case, I used the volume name as “var”) opt for Manually Format & Mount and click on Create Volume.

  3. Once the Volume is created, you will get a Modal pop up with the mounting instructions. Copy that and save it on a notepad. It will look something like this

  4. Now SSH into your Droplet and perform the following tasks:

  • You will need to stop the snapd service running in your Droplet:
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# service snapd stop
Warning: Stopping snapd.service, but it can still be activated by:
  snapd.socket


root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# service snapd status
● snapd.service - Snap Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/snapd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead) since Wed 2020-12-30 10:02:08 UTC; 1min 45s ago
TriggeredBy: ● snapd.socket
    Process: 3089 ExecStart=/usr/lib/snapd/snapd (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 3089 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

We need to stop this as snapd library files are located at /var/lib/snapd and while we copy, mount and reboot, the Droplet would fail to locate the .snap files due to block device change.

**You would need to gracefully stop any database services like MySQL as well. As I mentioned on the top, please make sure that you have backups in place. I would suggest taking MySQL dumps from your database before stopping the service and save it somewhere outside the Droplet environment. **

  • Create a Directory named “var_backup”:
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# mkdir /var_backup
  • Backup contents of /var to /var_backup:
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# cp -aRf /var/* /var_backup/
  • Now make ext4 filesystem for the volume.
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_var
mke2fs 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020)
Discarding device blocks: done
Creating filesystem with 2621440 4k blocks and 655360 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 828e2e2d-0470-4795-8058-6ca56a0f80df
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
	32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (16384 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

Please make sure to replace /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_var with whatever was shown on your Modal pop up initially when you created the volume.

  • Now comes the process of mounting. Here you would face downtime on your website and services. So you will want to plan this out whenever you anticipate less traffic.

  • Let us rename /var to something else:

root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# mv /var /var_original
  • Create a new /var/ directory:
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# mkdir /var
  • Let us mount our new volume to /var:
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# mount -o discard,defaults,noatime /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_var /var

(Replace /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_var as needed)

  • Verify that volume is mounted using df -h:
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:/var/lib/mysql# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            474M     0  474M   0% /dev
tmpfs            99M  960K   98M   1% /run
/dev/vda1        25G  3.3G   21G  14% /
tmpfs           491M     0  491M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           491M     0  491M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/vda15      105M  9.2M   96M   9% /boot/efi
/dev/sda        9.8G  918M  8.4G  10% /var
/dev/loop0       56M   56M     0 100% /snap/core18/1885
/dev/loop1       56M   56M     0 100% /snap/core18/1944
/dev/loop2       71M   71M     0 100% /snap/lxd/16922
/dev/loop3       68M   68M     0 100% /snap/lxd/18150
/dev/loop4       32M   32M     0 100% /snap/snapd/10492
/dev/loop5       31M   31M     0 100% /snap/snapd/9607
tmpfs            99M     0   99M   0% /run/user/0
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:/var/lib/mysql#
  • Copy contents from /var_backup or /var_original to /var
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# cp -aRf /var_backup/* /var
  • Now the mount we did above needs to stick post reboot as well. So, we need to make sure that the mount is entered in /etc/fstab file like below:
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# echo '/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_var /var ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_var /var ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0

(Please make sure to replace /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_var as needed)

  • Verify again that mount is defined in /etc/fstab file:
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs	/	 ext4	defaults	0 0
LABEL=UEFI	/boot/efi	vfat	defaults	0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_var /var ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0
  • Start your database services and snapd as well:
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# service snapd start
root@wordpress-ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-blr1-01:~# service snapd status
● snapd.service - Snap Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/snapd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Wed 2020-12-30 10:10:05 UTC; 5s ago
TriggeredBy: ● snapd.socket
   Main PID: 4644 (snapd)
      Tasks: 9 (limit: 1137)
     Memory: 71.7M
     CGroup: /system.slice/snapd.service
             └─4644 /usr/lib/snapd/snapd
  • Reboot the Droplet and test it if the mount point sticks post reboot. Once everything works fine, feel free to delete /var_backup and /var_orignal directory

I hope this helped!

Best,

Sandesh

Please please make sure that you have backed up everything before doing the above!