Hard drive on server which hosts public_html folder is full. What to do?

Solution 1:

Assuming your html folder is in /var/www/public_html and your 2nd hard drive is mounted in /mnt/drive2

mkdir /var/www/public_html/morevideos
ln -s /mnt/drive2 /var/www/public_html/morevideos

And you can now upload everything you like into /var/www/public_html/morevideos and off you go

Solution 2:

There's no simple way to just append a drive to an existing file system. You could, in theory symlink a directory in the second hard drive with ln -s path/to/actual-directory-on-drive2 /path/to/directory/in/public where the actual folder is on the second drive, and the link is on the drive you just filled up. I do believe you'd want to create the link from a directory in the second hard drive to a directory in public html.

The smart way would be to have used LVM or similar so you can add additional storage to the same volume to start with, and added drives as needed and to have overprovisioned and planned for what happens when a drive gets filled up.

This is a textbook example of needing to plan before you build it ;)