Jennifer Aniston and Friends Cost Us 377GB and Broke Ext4 Hardlinks
8 hours ago
- #file-storage
- #hardlink-limit
- #backup-optimization
- Discourse's secure uploads feature creates duplicate files for security, leading to massive storage bloat.
- A deduplication fix using hardlinks encountered ext4's limit of 65,000 hardlinks per inode.
- A single reaction GIF of Jennifer Aniston was duplicated 246,173 times, costing 377 GB in backup storage.
- The fallback mechanism allowed backups to complete, but performance was suboptimal due to the hardlink limit.
- A refined solution detects filesystem limits dynamically and copies files when limits are reached, improving robustness.