Best practice way of moving an Ext3 journal to another drive.
 

Hi,

I'm using Ext3 for my root filesystem. I'd like to permanently move the Journal from the boot drive to a newly-purchased USB flash drive. Could someone walk me through the best way to do this? I've found very little through web search, and nothing that was on a level I could understand.

I'm running Debian Wheezy.

Thank you :)

Hi
1st and foremost backup DATA. I then shrink the partition using gparted from a live cd "as you cant modif a mounted partition"
I then use dd command to copy partition to where ever
(FYI dd can destroy data if not used correctly to destination) "x" being the partition
The partition must be the same size or smaller than where you are moving too.
You will then have to edit /etc/fstab acordingly and update grub to point to where root is.
Think that covers it all

I've never attempted anything like that (having the journal on a separate device, remote from the rest of the filesystem). But a quick Google search turned up the following, which may be of some help to you:

http://insights.oetiker.ch/linux/ext...ournal-on-ssd/

FWIW, I don't think flash drives (I assume you're talking about a generic "thumbdrive") have all that many read/write cycles before they fail. So storing your journal there should mandate you to do a little research on the appropriateness of that endeavor before you embark on it. If you're talking about the newer SSD drives and not a "thumbdrive", maybe it isn't so much of a problem.

I'm afraid that's one of the articles I found that wasn't "on a level I could understand". The author assumes a level of technical knowledge that I personally don't have. Thanks though.

I think they're more robust than you'd expect - I've got some pretty old Flash drives still in use that've seen a lot of activity. And even then, journalling doesn't constitute a great deal of writing, and this is not a high-activity system I'm talking about. I'm willing to give it a shot, but thanks for the advisory :)

Thanks. That was going to a be a subsequent question. If it's as simple as using dd to make a bootable clone, then that's easy enough. :)