Resizing A Droplet The Correct Way

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!

mucho demora esto , ni google demora tanto!! casi 10m y nisiquiera se cambian.

Hi, i just resized my droplet from 1GB RAM to 2GB RAM ( CPU & Disk Size not changed). I did not lose any disk data, my old IP address & disk data were retained.

i just followed the steps in this documentation : https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/how-to/resize/

@mosaic - To resize a Droplet, you must first power it off. DigitalOcean, as of right now, does not offer a way to resize without powering down. While you can power down from DigitalOcean’s CP, ideally, it should be done from the CLI using the poweroff or shutdown -h now commands. Once the Droplet is offline, you can proceed to resize. The time it takes to resize varies and is not absolute, so it’s best to do this at a time when traffic is low.

The alternative is to create a snapshot (which also requires you to power down) of your current Droplet and then restore that snapshot to a larger Droplet of your choosing. In most cases, this is quicker and you’d follow the same process to shutdown the Droplet as you would if you were to choose to resize.