Restoring EXT3 Backups to EXT4 Server?

[autolux]

Bit of a hypothetical here.

But I have quite a few cPanel servers running on virtual machines, with CentOS 6.x & EXT3.

I need to migrate these servers to different storage and I'm investigating a few options.

The quickest seems to be to shut them down, mount the filesystem and rsync the data to a new virtual machine.

With the new virtual machine nodes, I have the option to deploy with EXT4. What I'm wondering is, if I rsync the data from an EXT3 server, to an EXT4 server, will it have any unforseen issues other than modifying /etc/fstab ?

From testing, it seems to work but I'm wondering if there will be any consequences before trying with production servers with many domains. Any filesystem gurus who can comment accurately?

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

It's generally recommended that you use the transfer features or backup/restore the accounts through /scripts/pkgacct and /scripts/restorepkg, as opposed to manually copying over the data via rsync. That being said, I don't foresee any issues if this works with your tests.

Thank you.

 

[desly]

Hello,

In my experience there is no issue doing this. Ext3 and Ext4 are two journaling filesystems and they differ in the mode, data is written to the disk and definitely in the speed.

Regarding migration you may proceed withe cpanel migration and its not recommended to do an rsync. Rsync can be done in the mail folders to make sure that we haven't missed any mails.