Hi to all,
this is my first post, thanks to all.

I have a vps.
I added an external disk, the fstabs

/dev/sda1 / ext4 errors=remount-ro,discard 0 1
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/mydisk ext4 nofail 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /var ext4 defaults 0 2

i want to move the /var dir to sda1.

i commented #/dev/sdb1 /var ext4 defaults 0 2

rebooted vps and launched rsync -aqxP /mnt/mydisk /var/*

my sda1 space growth, but i don't see the files..

what's wrong?

I think that i have a prolem in rsync command..
Hope someone can help me.

Thanks

no, it is definitely more complex. You cannot move the /var of a living system.
when you reboot your system /var will be created again, most probably that will be an empty directory. But during boot some files/dirs will be also automatically created. I have never tried it, but I think /var/* is not a single directory.

I would rather boot a live cd, do the copy and reboot the original system only when /var was already copied.

Many thanks for reply.

I'm sorry, but i used this guide https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-move-...ther-partition

Now, i want to move to original position /var dir.

I talk about a virtual private server, i can't use a live cd.
thanks

based on that page you simply mistyped the command. But I'm still not sure if that works perfectly.

Thanks.

I used that guide more months ago.
It works perfectly.

Now, i want to move /var to original position.

That guide tells how to move /var to an external hard drive. Is that what you did months ago? If you followed that procedure, it would work.

What is it you are trying to do now? Do you want to move /var from the external drive back to the internal hard drive?

Yes, correct!

Okay. I will get back to your plan to move /var, but first I want to explain why rsync did not work as you expected. It is because you specified the destination with a wildcard.

On my system, rsync does not accept that command. No files are transferred, and I get an error message. You mentioned that the sda1 space changed, so something got tranferred. My rsync is probably a different version than yours.
Edited to add: Sorry, rsync on my system does accept that command. It failed for another reason, file permissions.

On your system. what probably happened is that the command interpreter expanded the wildcard and then rsync used the expansion. rsync would then copy the source directory which you intended to transfer, and all but the last item in the wildcard expansion, and add them all to the last item in the wildcard expansion. In other words, one of the subdirectories of /var now contains (1) some files that belong there, (2) the files you intended to transfer to /var, and (3) a lot of other files that don't belong there.

Perfect Beryllos.
I think you are centered the point.
If you see this thread https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...4/#post5969709
(is a test), all data moved on last directory of destination.

Tonight (i'm in cet time), i'm going to unmount disk2 and try to find where data was copied.. .
thanks

pan64 is right. You should not move /var on a live system. You might be able to do it, but there are problems. The procedure in the article works because (1) you can copy /var to another drive, and (2) /var is reassigned to the external hard drive through fstab when you reboot.

The reverse process is harder. The difficulty is that you need to copy var back to sda1 before rebooting, and you need to copy it into the directory /var which is already being used as the mount point for the external hard drive. I don't know how to copy files to a mount point and not the mounted drive. Maybe there is a trick for this.

What you attempted to do is to copy the files after reboot. The problem, as pan64 wrote, is that upon reboot, the system immediately starts using the directory /var which was previously only a mount point. When you copy the files from the external drive to /var, you are attempting to overwrite files which the system is using.

Below I will give you the correctly-formed rsync command, but I cannot be sure it will work. The system may prevent some files from being copied, and if so, rsync will give error messages to let you know. If the system allows active files to be overwritten, the content of those files may become inconsistent, but perhaps the system will carry on satisfactorily after that.
As pan64 wrote, it would be safer to do this from a live cd, so that no active files are overwritten.

1 members found this post helpful.

okok, many thanks Beryllos!

OK, i found the duplicate data:

/var in the external disk is:
/var in the primary disk (after wrong command rsync -aqxP /mnt/mydisk /var/* )

i think i can delete /var/www/www
correct?

It looks like /var/www/www can be deleted, but it may be useful to keep it until you figure out what happened. I am not sure why /var/www/www is there. Did you run the incorrect rsync command two times, or more? Duplicate files and directories may exist in /var, /var/www, and /var/www/www. I am not sure of the best way for you to determine which are duplicates and may be deleted. (I would use md5deep but it is not very user-friendly.)

Yes, i run ithe wrong command many Times..
I think that the best way is to reinstall the os.. first i can backup data (prestashop directory and database), reinstall os and restore prestashop files and db..