Increasing Partition Space
The default configuration for Linux ext file systems is to reserve 5% of the file system space for emergency operations should the disk space being used approach 100%.
The traditional reason for this reserved space hails to the days of much smaller disk drives, but still applies today with larger disk capacities when so much data is being stored and accumulated. The Linux ext file system is good at not fragmenting files but as used disk space approaches 100% is less dependable. File fragmentation affects limited disk space.
Changing the amount of reserved space is straightforward with tune2fs -mP, where P is an integer representing the percent to reserve. For example, tune2fs -m2 /dev/sda9 will change the reserved space to 2% on disk /dev/sda partition 9.
With the 3 TB disks used here for weekly backups the reserved space is 0%. That 5% default is reasonable for some use cases, such as system partitions or partitions dedicated to logs. Often the default is unnecessary with certain partitions such as data partitions.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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