[Discuss] Recovering a corrupted usb hard drive with XFS

[Rich Pieri]

On Fri, 17 May 2024 22:48:33 -0400
"Dale R. Worley" <worley at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> Unfortunately for (1) there seems to be no way to shrink an XFS
> filesystem, so if you haven't accidentally got at least 1 MiB or so
> free after the filesystem, there's little that you can do.  See e.g.

The tools on GNU Parted CD might be able to shrink an XFS filesystem
but I don't know if it can be done if there is no partition table. I
personally am wary of filesystem converters. I haven't had the best
experiences with them. And block level surgery frightens me when there
is no safety net.

I think the best solution costs money: buy an identical drive and prep
it to be one of a mirrored pair, copy the data to it, clean up the
original drive, and make it the other mirror. I say "best" because it
gets your storage partitioned properly and you have data redundancy.

And no worries about throughput. A single USB 3.0 link (5 Gbit/s) can
easily handle two rotating drives (typically well under 2 Gbit/s each).
I run my home server backups and some auxiliary storage on ZFS mirrored
pairs in a two-bay USB 3.0 dock. No problems with throughput.

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