How to add an SDcard as filesystem extension?

[Andreas_S]

Hi,
the filesystem of my Vero 4K+ has reached its limits, alone the Thumbnails folder is greater than 8GB. So I decided to add an SDcard for additional space. This ended in a desaster (Vero 4K+ bricked - really). Now I ordered the next Vero 4K+ and would like to ask in the community how to extend the disk space with an SDcard.
My idea was, to format the SDcard with an ext4 filesystem, to mount it in some directory (like /data) and to have a symbolic link to the Thumbnails directory. I don’t want to use this SDcard as home of the kodi-User as I’ve seeen far too often that SDcards fail and loosing only the thumbnails wouldn’t hurt too much.
From my previous experiments with SDcards I stumbled over these things: At some point the SDcard was mounted only RO (without having done anything) - maybe the card was defect? Don’t know…
When I first succeeded to use it, the copy from the original Thumbnails folder didn’t continue to copy at some point and reviewing the last commands I saw, that the mke2fs created only 4096 1k blocks on a 16GB card, so I believed that the copy just hang without error message when this limit was reached.
So my questions here are:

• How to create the filesystem correctly?
• How to make sure, that the card is mounted on every boot? fstab doesn’t seem to be the only solution)

Any help is appreciated

[Tom_Doyle]

Moving Thumbnails to SD card

Hi. I’m using the following commands to move the Thumbnails as my library is large and I’m running low on memory. My question is for the path substitution part. I left the folder name of the SD card as New Volume_ and relaized I needed to add quotes around it to get the mv linux command to work. When applying the location in the path susbstitution section do I need the quotes? sudo systemctl stop mediacenter mv ~/.kodi/userdata/Thumbnails/ /media/"New Volume_"/Thumbnails/ nano ~/.kodi/user…

[darwindesign]

On your old Vero if you can get to the terminal you can probably just delete the Thumbnails folder and be good to go on that one.

As for the size problem your issue just may be that you had a lot of old cached images in there that were abandoned from changing around your library or similar. It would take an exceptionally large library to fill up the Vero’s internal storage otherwise as each cached image is only a very small jpg (unless you changed their size via an advancedsettings.xml file). If you wanted to go with the SD card thing like with what Tom posted above I wouldn’t bother manually mounting it. Just make sure you give it a unique name when you format and then it should always automatically mount using that. If your media happens to be mounted on a network share that is always on then you might just skip the SD card and just path substitute the Thumbnails folder over to that network share. In the past I had tested this type of setup for months and never ran into a problem with it. The only caveat here would be if you have multiple clients setup like this they must each point to their own unique folder.

[Andreas_S]

thanks, Tom. I’ve followed the instructions of your link and that works perfectly.

[Andreas_S]

Really no chance to access the Vero (Red cross is showing and restoring a system from USB doesn’t work). Some old data was surely in the cache, but Scraping from my NAS to the new system already filled up 6GB in the SDcard.