On 20/09/2023 22:16, Neil Bothwick wrote:
On Wed, 20 Sep 2023 20:24:17 -0000 (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote:
However, GParted apparently does. Can GParted move an ext4 filesystem
to a destination location that overlaps its starting location?
For example, I have a 500GB partition containing an ext4 filesystem
starting at sector 2048 (1MiB). I want to move that filesystem so that
it starts at sector 3*2048 (3MiB).
Can that be done in-place?
Or should I just back up the filesystem to a second drive and start
from scratch?
Given that you'd want to backup before such an operation anyway, you may
as well then restore from that backup. I'm sure it will be a lot quicker
than GParted's moving all the data around.
Or, assuming the people who wrote gparted have two brain cells to rub
together, I'm pretty sure they use the same technique as memmove.
"If the regions overlap, make sure you start from whichever end won't
overwrite the source, otherwise start at whichever end you like".
Barring screw-ups (a very unsafe assumption :-), I'm pretty certain you
don't even need a backup!
I suspect the man-page even confirms this behaviour.
Cheers,
Wol
