![usb drives](https://www.howtoraspberry.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IMG_7488.jpg)
Running your raspberry pi from SDcard works, but has its foibles. For one, consistent reading and writing to and from an SDcard is a sure recipe for failure. Sure, the little memory cards are fast and cheap, but they don’t take well to this kind of abuse. Especially the unrelenting i/o of a swapfile. Better to move your swapfile from the SDcard to a USB device. From Ubuntu 18.04 onwards, a swapfile rather than a dedicated swap partition is used. The swap file is named “swapfile”. First, find the swap file and delete it.
root@pi4:~# swapon -s Filename Type Size Used Priority /var/swap file 102396 0 -2 root@pi4:~# cd /var root@pi4:/var# ls -la total 102448 drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Feb 13 11:31 . drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4096 Feb 13 11:31 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 16 07:56 backups drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4096 Apr 15 15:04 cache drwxr-xr-x 47 root root 4096 Apr 15 15:04 lib drwxrwsr-x 2 root staff 4096 Feb 8 21:47 local lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Feb 13 10:51 lock -> /run/lock drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Apr 16 00:01 log drwxrwsr-x 2 root mail 4096 Feb 13 10:51 mail drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 13 10:51 opt lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Feb 13 10:51 run -> /run drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Feb 13 11:09 spool -rw------- 1 root root 104857600 Feb 13 11:31 swap <--- Thar she blows!!! drwxrwxrwt 4 root root 4096 Apr 16 13:14 tmp root@pi4:/var# swapoff /var/swap root@pi4:/var# rm /var/swap
Find your USB drive. Mine is /dev/sda1 that I’ve got mounted as ‘/’. You can move your entire filesystem to USB, by following these directions.
root@pi4:~# lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 1 7.5G 0 disk └─sda1 8:1 1 7.5G 0 part / mmcblk0 179:0 0 29.8G 0 disk ├─mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 256M 0 part /boot └─mmcblk0p2 179:2 0 29.6G 0 part root@pi4:~#
Create a new swap file of the desired size. I generally use a 4GB swap. Determine the size of your swap file. If you want to make a 4 GB swap file, you will need to write 4 * 1024 blocks of 10242 bytes (= 1 MiB). That will make your count equal to 4 * 1024 = 4096. Create the file of this size with the command:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=4096
Assign it read/write permissions for root only (not strictly needed, but it tightens security)
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
Format the file as swap:
sudo mkswap /swapfile
The file will be activated on the next reboot. If you want to activate it for the current session:
sudo swapon /swapfile
You can check the swap that is available with the command swapon -s (no root permissions needed). And there you have it! You’re swapping to and from USB thumb-drive. Congratulations for not having to worry about blowing out your SDcard!
![Running on USB](https://www.howtoraspberry.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IMG_7485.jpg)
The title says Raspbian but then you talk about swap file in Ubuntu not Raspbian.
Better decide what you are writing about