SOLVED Relocating mail folder to save disk space

Hi,

I'm running out of root disk space on my system and I'd like to move one /home/user/mail folder to another partition to free some space.

I tried that by creating a symbolic link pointing from /home/user/mail to /mnt/stuff/mail and it seemed to work only half way. I can read mail, but when sending email with Thunderbird IMAP, it says that saving message to outbox failed. I've ensured that the user has write permissions to the symlinked folder (i.e. "cd mail", "touch file" is able to create file in the new folder normally).

Any ideas why it failed and how to make this work? Thanks!

 

Thanks Michael! Sounds like a solution.

(See edit below)

I tried that but ran into trouble (new home dir does not seem to be detected). The Rearrage feature says "Sorry, there is only one usable partition detected on this machine matching “home”". The Basic settings are set to "/home" and additional names as "home" (tried "home2", "/home2" too, same problem).

Some sys info:

Code:

root@vps [/]# mount
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
devtmpfs on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,size=1019784k,nr_inodes=254946,mode=755)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,mode=755)
tmpfs on /sys/fs/cgroup type tmpfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=755)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,xattr,release_agent=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-cgroups-agent,name=systemd)
pstore on /sys/fs/pstore type pstore (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpuset)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,cpuacct type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpuacct,cpu)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/memory type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,memory)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/devices type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,devices)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,freezer)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,net_cls)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,blkio)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,perf_event)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,hugetlb)
configfs on /sys/kernel/config type configfs (rw,relatime)
/dev/vda1 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,quota,usrquota,data=ordered)
systemd-1 on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type autofs (rw,relatime,fd=33,pgrp=1,timeout=300,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct)
hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages type hugetlbfs (rw,relatime)
mqueue on /dev/mqueue type mqueue (rw,relatime)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw,relatime)
/dev/sda on /home2 type ext4 (rw,relatime,discard,data=ordered)
tmpfs on /run/user/0 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=205008k,mode=700)

Code:

root@vps [/]# df -kh
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        40G   31G  7.3G  81% /
devtmpfs        996M     0  996M   0% /dev
tmpfs          1002M     0 1002M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs          1002M  8.6M  993M   1% /run
tmpfs          1002M     0 1002M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda         59G   53M   56G   1% /home2
tmpfs           201M     0  201M   0% /run/user/0

Code:

root@vps [/]# cat /etc/fstab

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Tue Jul  8 23:01:42 2014
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
LABEL=DOROOT    /       ext4    defaults,usrquota       1       1

/swapfile   swap    swap    sw  0   0
/swapfile2  swap    swap    sw  0   0

/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_homedirvolume60gb /home2 ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0

Code:

root@vps [/]# ls -l |grep home
drwx--x--x.  15 root root       4096 Mar 24 01:20 home/
drwx--x--x    3 root root       4096 Mar 24 00:53 home2/

Please let me know if you got any idea what's wrong with this. Thanks!

EDIT: I checked the relocate again today and now the new home appears in the list. I just had to wait overnight. Would be nice if the necessary waiting time would be specified in documentation to avoid confusion.

 

Here are my settings:



As told, tried also home2 and /home2 on the second option.

 

That is a good idea. Thanks!