After reading up a bit on ext4 and hearing Ted Ts’o talk last year at NLUUG decided to start with converting at least one filesystem to ext4 and see how it holds out. For the test I choose my backup filesystem. This filesystem is used to make backups of a number of systems using the “hardlink snapshot” method. Not a huge filesystem (300GB), but it has got quite a bit of files on there.

The filesystem was an ext3 filesystem already. Following the pretty straight forward procedure on the ext4 wiki:

umount /dev/sda1 tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sda1 e2fsck -fDC0 /dev/sda1 mount /backup

As described in the procedure, fsck fixed some checksums on the group descriptors.

All seems well after the convert and we’ll see how it holds up the next few weeks running the daily backups.