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I did mention that the new filesystem - ext4 is stable, fast and backward compatible with ext2 and ext3. Today, we will look at how you can upgrade your existing ext3 filesystem to ext4 without reformating your hard disk.
You can convert your existing Ext3 filesystem to Ext4 with an easy procedure.Things to remember
* Unmount the filesystem before convert
* Filesystem must be non-root
This way you can improve the performance, storage limits and features of your existing filesystem without reformatting and/or reinstalling your OS and softwares.
One might think that the ext3 filesystem, by virtue of being standard on almost all installed Linux systems for some years now, would be reasonably well tuned for performance. Recent events have shown, though, that some performance problems remain in ext3, especially in places where the fsync() system call is used.
The ext3 filesystem supports write barriers which are designed to allow a filesystem to take advantage of a disk’s write cache without fear of compromising the ingetrity of the filesystem on a power failure or kernel panic.
This article is meant to serve as a guide for migrating a live system from ext3 to an ext4 filesystem, including migration of files to use extents, a major feature in ext4.
The following tweaks assume that you are using an ext3 filesystem for your Ubuntu OS and they will offer a noticeable performance boost! However, there is also a bad side of them… if you don’t have an UPS and your system will power off accidentally or because of a power loss, YOU WILL LOSE IMPORTANT DATA!
I use a one terabyte external hard drive for backing up data. The drive came formatted with a FAT filesystem, which I immediately replaced with the more reliable ext3. After formatting the drive as ext3 I noticed that the storage capacity had dropped considerably. Why did this happen?
rsnapshot is a filesystem backup utility based on rsync. Using rsnapshot, it is possible to take snapshots of your filesystems at different points in time. Using hard links, rsnapshot creates the illusion of multiple full backups, while only taking up the space of one full backup plus differences. When coupled with ssh, it is possible to take snapshots of remote filesystems as well.
