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Steps to take before resizing partition to prevent damaging data

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http://askubuntu.com – I use Ubuntu 11.10 and have three partitions, one ext4 for the root directory, one ext4 for the /home and one for swap. I need to release disk space so I can increase swap space, and create a new partition for a Windows installation (meh, but it's a need for work stuff like visual studio). So I was thinking about resizing the /home partition (taking off 50Gbs of about 60Gb free it has) but I'm kinda afraid of things going wrong and losing /home data in this operation. So, what things should I do to increase safety? (I'm not in conditions to make a proper backup right now). (HowTos)

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Submitted by missing on 02/15/2012 – Made popular on 02/15/2012

Stories similar to Steps to take before resizing partition to prevent damaging data

Linux partitions are basically of three types: swap, root, and home. The swap partition is used for Linux swap space, root partition for Linux and the installed applications, and home partitions for holding /home directory i.e. data. When it comes to data accessibility, the latter two partitions are comparatively more vital for uninterrupted data access.

An old headless no-X backup server I use has a small hard drive with three primary ext4 partitions: /, /home and /swap. The system is unable to run updates, as there are insufficient inodes available on the 1.5GB / partition. There is unused space available on /home.

Would resizing the / partition from a live GParted environment solve this?

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I have 250Gb drive on a laptop, which has Windows 7 on a 122Gb ntfs partition (which has a "boot" flag on it) and Ubuntu 12.04.1 on a 110Gb extended partition, of which the root ext4 partition is 108Gb and the swap is 1.74Gb. You can see everything in the screenshot below.

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Hello,

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The question(s) is: 1.