On Fri, Dec 31, 2021 at 10:48 AM Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> wrote:
> Note for anyone using VERY LARGE hard drives for dirvish > in this way: format the drive with a shit-ton of extra > inodes, or you will use those up long before you run out > of data sectors. Perhaps there are file system types that > can reconfigure data space into extra inodes, and also > reconfigure around emerging patches of failed disk; this > would be handy to fill a large backup drive chock full. FWIW, the way rsync link-dest-based backups work is that unchanged files are hardlinked, which means a new filename points at an existing inode to save space. That means that running out of inodes isn't such a problem. For example, I have a 10TB RAID1 backup partition with ext4 filesystem and despite having MANY, MANY backups, and being about 80% full with regard to storage space, I am only using (according to df -i) about 31% of the available inodes. This was with the standard number of inodes allocated from a plain jane mkfs.ext4.
