Hi. About the description of fstransform package in [1]: fstransform can do the conversion of a filesystem in place and without the need of a backup. Of course there is some possibility that the operation encounters some error (which could bring the partition in an inconsistent state, from which recover could be difficult or even nearly impossible), so a backup is heavily encouraged. But if you decide to risk and have luck, you can actually do a filesystem conversion without copying files out of the partition. [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=661266 Fstransform works exploiting the sparse files feature of both original and target filesystems: it creates a sparse file in the original filesystem, of the same size as the whole partition itself. Then if formats it using the target filesystem and start copying files inside it (mounting it via a loop device). Each file is copied in blocks of fixed size (a few KBs, I can't remember the exact figure now), so also files as big as half the partition don't raise problems. Once all the files are copied into the loop target filesystem, the blocks of the target filesystem are remapped to their correct position in the partition, effectively replacing the old filesystem. There is no need of a backup for such operation, unless, of course, somewhat goes wrong... Giovanni. -- Giovanni Mascellani <mascellani@poisson.phc.unipi.it> Pisa, Italy Web: http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~mascellani Jabber: g.mascellani@jabber.org / giovanni@elabor.homelinux.org
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