Expand Disk Space on a Linux Server

After resizing your server to a larger plan, the additional disk space is allocated but not automatically available. You must resize the partition and expand the filesystem to use the new space.

Check Current Disk Usage

$df -h /

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        25G   8G   17G  32% /

$lsblk

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
vda    252:0    0   80G  0 disk
└─vda1 252:1    0   25G  0 part /

The disk (vda) is 80 GB but the partition (vda1) is only 25 GB — the remaining 55 GB is unallocated.

Step 1 — Install growpart

$apt install -y cloud-guest-utils

Step 2 — Resize the Partition

$growpart /dev/vda 1

CHANGED: partition=1 start=2048 old: size=52426752 end=52428800 new: size=167770079 end=167772127

Step 3 — Resize the Filesystem

For ext4 filesystems:

$resize2fs /dev/vda1

resize2fs 1.46.5 (30-Dec-2021)
Filesystem at /dev/vda1 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 4, new_desc_blocks = 10
The filesystem on /dev/vda1 is now 20971259 (4k) blocks long.

For XFS filesystems:

$xfs_growfs /

Step 4 — Verify the New Size

$df -h /

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        79G   8G   71G  11% /

The filesystem now uses the full 80 GB disk.

[!NOTE] This process is safe to perform on a live, running server. The resize2fs command supports online resizing for ext4 filesystems mounted at /.