Is there a way to sync only one partition instead of all partitions?
Something like "sync /dev/sdc1".
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- 1No. As far as I am aware. Good question, though.Nikhil Mulley– Nikhil Mulley2012-01-07 19:26:08 +00:00Commented Jan 7, 2012 at 19:26
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6 Answers
you can remount with sync option and then remount it back with async:
mount -o remount,sync /mountpoint mount -o remount,async /mountpoint Using remount option will not mess with processes using remounted filesystem.
- 2Why do you think that 2 remounts are necessary? In at least 2.6.32 kernel do_remount_sb performs sync_filesystem which is the same function that is called in syncfs system call introduced in lwn.net/Articles/433384.Yuriy Nazarov– Yuriy Nazarov2016-03-01 17:38:04 +00:00Commented Mar 1, 2016 at 17:38
It is now possible with sync -f:
sync -f /mount/point Excerpt from sync(1):
-f, --file-system sync the file systems that contain the files 
There is a standard function to synchronize data (and metadata) of one file: fsync. There is no standard or common shell command to access it, but you can use perl's sync method in IO::Handle:
perl -MIO::File -e 'new IO::File($ARGV[0], "r+")->sync()' filename There is no standard or common function or shell command to synchronize just one partition.
On recent Linux systems, there is the syncfs system call (introduced in kernel 2.6.39, and exposed since glibc 2.14). I don't think this system call is exposed in coreutils or util-linux yet.
answered Jan 7, 2012 at 23:59
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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- 3The last sentence about
syncfsis the most relevant part.poolie– poolie2017-01-25 22:42:35 +00:00Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 22:42
Mounting the partition with the sync option may be a solution.
If you mean the sync utility that flushes data in memory to disk, then the answer is no. This is due to the fact that sync is generally used during a shutdown or reboot procedure, where it's advisable to get data written safely to disk, and the real target of the operation is memory, not the disks, and getting that buffered data out of RAM to somewhere safe. The disks are just where the data ends up.
If btrfs:
btrfs filesystem sync /path/under/mountpoint 