Expanding your A3 System Drive

Problem: Your A3 root partition ("/") is running low on space

Solution: Grow the disk, partition, and filesystem

While all of your backup data for the A3 resides on your ADS or ODS storage, however InstaBoot (Instant Restore) delta data does reside on the A3's system drive by default, and can take significant amounts of storage, depending on the workload and length of time the restored systems run on the A3.

So, to provide more space for your A3, you can simply grow the disk as shown below. Alternatively, if you wish to move the Instaboot storage area to a different disk entirely, you can follow this guide.

Please ensure your Alike services are stopped before proceeding!

1) Determine your root partition location by running the command "df -h /" on the A3 command console. By default it resides on /dev/xvda2 Please note the partition number "eg 2", as it will be used in step 2

alike@a3h:~$ df -h /
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda2               11.6G      5.4G      5.6G  49% /

2) Expand the partition using "parted". Run the command "sudo parted /dev/xvda". Delete the existing partition, then add a new, larger one in its place (this will not delete any data!)

alike@a3h:~$ sudo parted /dev/xvda
rm 2
mkpart primary ext4 1MiB 100%
quit

3) Finally, resize your filesystem to expand to the size of the new partition. For this you will need to install a new package to the A3

sudo apk add e2fsprogs-extra
(1/1) Installing e2fsprogs-extra (1.46.6-r0)
Executing busybox-1.34.1-r7.trigger
OK: 410 MiB in 191 packages

The, perform the fs grow:

sudo resize2fs /dev/xvda2

4) Finally, you can confirm the changes with

alike@a3h:~$ df -h /