Since 3 days i’m working on migrating 2 Servers into 1. This should have been an easy task, at least i hoped so. However, i noticed, that everytime i’m copying more than 41 GB to the new disc, i’m getting “Disk is full” errors. And i was really wondering, because “df -hT” shows that of 1 TB data only 41 GB are used. As the topic of this article might explain already: Yes. “df -i” shows that the inodes are full. This is due to a “bad” choice of me, when creating the filesystem. When creating an ext3 filesystem, you can tell it for what the filesystem will be used, for example news and large. This usage-parameter might be important because, if you have a lot of big files like on a storage, “large” might be a good choice. If you’re now trying to save all your mails and logfiles on this storage (usually small files) you’ll very soon run out of space, or to be correct: out of inodes. If you now use the opposite “news” instead of “large” you’ll have performance problems with big – very big files. The default value in my distribution seems to be a inode_ratio of 16384 (16 MB) by the way. “news” got 4 MB and “large” got an inode_ratio of 1 GB.
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