I'm helping a friend of mine with their VPS that is pretty out of date OS wise and I would like to copy the boot disk image before i update the OS in case I break something

he has the 24GB plan but for some reason is only using 20GB (4 left over)...

Would I be able to resize the image down to around 10GB, copy the image to the same VPS and then run the OS updates?

Sorry if it is a dumb question, first time working with Linode

That ought to work, as long as he only has 10GB (or less) of actual data on the disk. The resize will fail if you try to shrink an image smaller than the data it contains (but no data should be lost).

Note that if you have two separate disk images, you can boot either one, but you can't have both running at the same time. If he can't tolerate the downtime, standard advice is to clone the Linode, perform the upgrade on the clone, then swap IP addresses if the upgrade is successful.

It seems like the best option would be to clone to a new vps, seems like a pain in the butt. I'm used to dealing with my personal vboxes.

wish i could just download the image. perform the update and then if it breaks upload it back.

Where's the pain? Clone is a click and wait for the disks to copy. Run the upgrade on the new one, then if it's good, click the button to swap IP's. voila. I would think that's much easier than downloading the image and then uploading it back. You do have to front a prorated month for the new linode, but you'll get a credit back when you destroy the old one.

on my setup i just cp my disk image to a backup file.. run whatever i'm going to do and if/when it breaks i shut down the vps and load with the backup image.

so i guess for what i'm used to with full server access.. yeah it is a pain cause i want to do it my way

It isn't that bad, i'll manage. Thanks for the info.