Re: [HPDD-discuss] Shirinking the mdt volume

When we set up our mdt volume, lo these many years past, we did it with a 2TB volume. Overkill. About 17G is actually in use. This is a Lustre 1.8.4 system backed by about 450TB of OST on 8 servers. I would _love_ to shrink this mdt volume to a more manageable size, say, 50GB or so, as we are now in a down time before we upgrade to Lustre 2.1.6 on SL6.4. I have taken a "dd" of the volume, and am now in the process of doing getfattr -R -d -m '.*' -P . > /tmp/mdt_ea.bak after which I will do a tar czf {backup file}.tgz --sparse /bin/tar is the SL5 version tar-1.20-6.x86_64. This supports the --xattrs switch. So, a choice here, should I instead use the --xattrs switch on the tar, or should I use --no-xattrs since the mdt_ea.bak will have all of them? What are my prospects for success, if I restore that tar file to a smaller volume, then apply the attr backup, before I upgrade? Answers and advice are greatly appreciated.