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Shrink root filesystem partition ext4 NVME SSD live?

cn flag

There are hundreds of similar questions to this when I google it, but none seem to match up exactly with what I hope to do. So, Unbuntu 20.04, a 1TB NVME SSD with a 500MB FAT32 /boot/efi Partition 1, and an EXT4 Partition 2 mounted at Filesystem Root filling up the remainder of the drive. Only 3% of Partition 2 is in use. I'd like to shrink Partition 2 to something a bit more reasonable -- like 100GB -- so when I create an .iso of the filesystem for rescue purposes it's not absurdly large. gnome-disk-utility seems willing to let me shrink Partition 2 and I am tempted to just let it take a swing at it. But this PC is running 24/7 as part of an FM radio broadcast air chain so I hope not to bork it or have to reboot it. I have backed up the target machine's home directory. Thank you.

in flag
You want to resize the main system partition while the machine is running and not have to deal with reboots? Yeah … that’s not recommended. File systems don’t like being treated like PlayDoh
That Jack Elliott avatar
cn flag
Ah, very good! Thank you for the information. I'll approach this project differently.
PonJar avatar
in flag
If you make a backup with something like Clonezilla it will not be absurdly large. The size of the backup will be more reflective of the used space, not the size of the partition
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