I’m running out of disk space, what now?

/docs/gears/faq-howto-troubleshooting/howto-running-out-of-disk-space/

Overview

The default images for UBOS aren’t very large, so they can fit onto cheap SD cards, USB sticks and small Amazon EC2 root volumes. That works fine if you don’t have a lot of data on your device. But what if you do?

There are two ways to solve this issue:

Pick a new disk that has the size you need, install UBOS on that disk and also keep your data on that disk.
Keep running UBOS on one disk, and add a new disk that has the size you need as a “data” disk.

It’s easiest to get set up correctly for either alternative before you install any Apps on your Device. However, we also have instructions for how to migrate once you have.

Using a large, single disk that contains both operating system and data

The best way to do that is to run ubos-install on the new disk, using a Device that runs UBOS already. Here are the steps:

If you are starting from scratch:

Download a UBOS image for your platform, and boot your Device with it.
Attach your big future root disk to the Device. If it’s an SD card, that requires a USB-SD card adapter.
Identify which block device corresponds to your disk. This is easiest by executing lsblk once before you attach the disk, and again right after. The change in output tells you the name of the block device, such as /dev/sdb.
Run ubos-install with the block device you identified.
Shut down your Device.
Remove your old boot disk, and attach your new boot disk in its place.
Reboot from the new disk.

If you have Apps and data on your Device already:

Boot your Device.
Attach your big future root disk to the Device. If it’s an SD card, that requires a USB-SD card adapter.
Identify which block device corresponds to your disk. This is easiest by executing lsblk once before you attach the disk, and again right after. The change in output tells you the name of the block device, such as /dev/sdb.
Run ubos-install with the block device you identified.
Mount the root partition of your new disk. Assuming the new root partition is /dev/sdb2, execute:
```
% sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt
```

Back up your Sites to a suitable directory of the mounted disk, such as:

% sudo ubos-admin backup --backuptofile /mnt/root/from-small-disk.ubos-backup

Unmount your new disk, and shut down your Device:
```
% sudo umount /mnt
% sudo systemctl poweroff
```
Remove your old boot disk, and attach your new boot disk in its place.
Boot with the new disk.

Restore your data from backup:

% sudo ubos-admin restore --in /root/from-small-disk.ubos-backup

Using an additional “data” disk

If you are starting from scratch:

Boot your Device.
Attach your big data disk to the Device.
Identify which block device corresponds to your data disk. This is easiest by executing lsblk once before you attach the disk, and again right after. The change in output tells you the name of the block device, such as /dev/sdb.
Make sure your data disk is formatted with either ext4 or btrfs. We recommend btrfs as UBOS takes advantage of copy-on-write features, thereby saving disk space and speeding up some operations. You can use your entire disk, or just one partition.
Mount your data disk at /ubos by executing:
```
% sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /ubos
```
Update /etc/fstab so that the disk will be automatically mounted after a reboot. This is important. If your data disk is not available at boot time, your Device will likely hang instead of booting. An easy way to determine what to add to /etc/fstab comes courtesy of the Arch Linux install scripts:
```
% sudo pacman -S arch-install-scripts
% genfstab /
```
Compare the output of this script, with the content of /etc/fstab. Ignore the lines that start with a #. You will likely find a single line that’s different. Add this line to the end of /etc/fstab. It probably looks something like this:
```
/dev/sdb2     /ubos     btrfs     rw,relatime,space_cache,subvolid=5,subvol=/     0 0
```
Reboot and check that the data disk is property mounted.
Generate a snapper configuration so UBOS can automatically create disk snapshots when an update is executed:
```
% sudo snapper -c ubos create-config -t ubos-default /ubos
```

If you have Apps and data on your Device already:

This takes the following steps:

Boot your Device.
Backup all data on your Device with ubos-admin backup and store the backup file on a disk that you then remove from the Device before continuing. Just to be safe :-)
Disable all system services that access your /ubos directory. Which services that are depend highly on what Apps you currently run on the Device. You can find all running services with:
```
% systemctl
```
To find processes that access /ubos, you can use lsof. Most importantly, make sure no databases are running:
```
% sudo systemctl stop mysqld postgresql
```
Attach your big data disk to the Device.
Identify which block device corresponds to your data disk. This is easiest by executing lsblk once before you attach the disk, and again right after. The change in output tells you the name of the block device, such as /dev/sdb.
Make sure your data disk is formatted with either ext4 or btrfs. We recommend btrfs as UBOS takes advantage of copy-on-write features, thereby saving disk space and speeding up some operations. You can use your entire disk, or just one partition.
Move your old /ubos out of the way, and create a new one, as root:
```
% sudo su
# mv /ubos /ubos.too-small
# mkdir /ubos
```
Mount your data disk at /ubos by executing:
```
% sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /ubos/
```
Update /etc/fstab so that the disk will be automatically mounted after reboots. This is important. If your data disk is not available at boot time, your Device will likely hang instead of booting. An easy way to determine what to add to /etc/fstab comes courtesy of the Arch Linux install scripts:
```
% sudo pacman -S arch-install-scripts
% genfstab /
```
Compare the output of this script, with the content of /etc/fstab. Ignore the lines that start with a #. You will likely find a single line that’s different. Add this line to the end of /etc/fstab. It probably looks something like this:
```
/dev/sdb2     /ubos     btrfs     rw,relatime,space_cache,subvolid=5,subvol=/     0 0
```

Copy your data over, as root:

% sudo su
# cp -a /ubos.too-small/* /ubos

Reboot and check that the data disk is property mounted and all Apps are functional again.
Delete /ubos.too-small
Generate a snapper configuration so UBOS can automatically create disk snapshots when an update is executed:
```
% sudo snapper -c ubos create-config -t ubos-default /ubos
```

Use the magic of btrfs

If you went with the default, UBOS runs the btrfs filesystem on your Device. Then you can simply add another disk to your Device, such as an external USB disk, and add it to the btrfs filesystem with a command such as:

sudo btrfs device add /dev/sdb /

In VirtualBox: I’m running out of space on my disk image. What now?

You can resize your VirtualBox disk image. Instructions can be found on the web, such as at http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/resizing-virtualbox-disk-image .