Managing disk space has always been a significant task for sysadmins. Running out of disk space used to be the start of a long and complex series of tasks to increase the space available to a disk partition. It also required taking the system off-line. This usually involved installing a new hard drive, booting to recovery or single-user mode, creating a partition and a filesystem on the new hard drive, using temporary mount points to move the data from the too-small filesystem to the new, larger one, changing the content of the /etc/fstab file to reflect the correct device name for the new partition, and rebooting to remount the new filesystem on the correct mount point.
