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My webserver keeps giving me the error backup failed due to high INODE usage... What is this and how can I prevent it?

nlangerdev
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To over-simplify, an inode is an entry in the filesystem's database. An inode can represent a directory or a file, among other things. If you have run out of inodes, then you likely have too many files on your volume. If you can, delete some files or move them to another volume. Another option might be to tar or compress a bunch of files in to one file.

See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26598/how-can-i-increase-the-number-of-inodes-in-an-ext4-filesystem

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longneck
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In a Unix-style file system, an index node, informally referred to as an inode, is a data structure used to represent a filesystem object, which can be one of various things including a file or a directory.

Wikipedia

You may check the inode usage with the command

df -i

Use this command to find which root folder have an unusually high number of files

for i in /*; do echo $i; find $i |wc -l; done

Then repeat with the folder that seems to be too big :

for i in /home/*; do echo $i; find $i |wc -l; done

You may delete the folders containing too much inodes. WARNING : Be sure that these files are not important before deleting anything !

Check again with 'df -i' if inode usage got down.

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Eric Ly
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