When I choose a 40Gb Linode with CentOs it creates the ext3 partition with about just under 5Gb. The total space allocated is 5Gb. The Dashboard states I have 35Gb unallocated.

I only just noticed this when I can see I was using almost 50% space!

Is there a reason for this? Should I not just go and allocate the whole 40Gb to my drive?

I am a little annoyed because I have to shutdown the Linode to do a resize but I have customer sites on there now. If I knew this in the first place I would have grabbed my allocated space before making sites live.

Or should I be keeping it down and increasing when I need it? e.g. am I charged for having more unused space (I doubt it). Or is it just a way for Linode to make sure it has enough free space for everyone?

Thanks

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Web Development Agency in South Wales

Was this a linode restored from a backup by any chance?

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i'm pretty sure linode reserve the whole amount, allocated or not, they don't over sell space.
Just arrange a planned outage, and resize, can't do much else about it now.
All hosting plans except the well engineered redundant ones have planned outages.
the last time I created a new node, it allocated all the space, so I don't know what happened with you

if it was restored from a backup, it'd have no free space i believe (but I don't use linode backups)

Right, you prompted me to check something... my first 40Gb Linode has all the space allocated. This second one has only 5Gb. I created this second one by restoring a backup from the first... so I guess in that restore process there was a setting maybe to choose the space, but I must have just assumed it would use the full amount and left it at default. I will look out for it next time.

Thanks

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Web Development Agency in South Wales

There is no prompt to select the restored image size. The Linode Backup Service only restores a disk image large enough to contain all of the backed up data. If you need this disk image to be larger, you'll need to use the disk resize function after the restore has been finished.

-Tim

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'If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.' //Edsger Dijkstra
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so it sounds like you restored the backup then deleted 2.5G of data.

Ah right, that explains it. So I restored a backup, the Linode creates enough space for that only, the rest unallocated.

Thats fine, I know now for next time, I need to then resize it after restore before putting live sites on to save downtime later.

I did delete some files after yes, must have been 2.5Gb, the original server is running at about 5Gb.

All makes sense now!

Thanks

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Web Development Agency in South Wales