Developer interview: Eric Sandeen on ext4 implementation

Developer interview: Eric Sandeen on ext4 implementation

In some cases there are only inodes and no files. This is called a hard link.

Normally, a hard link is a directory entry (dirents point to inodes), and increases the link count in the inode that is being referred to. Adding hard links creates an additional directory entry for the directory where the hard link is being made.

Maybe you were referring to symbolic links?

Hmm.... so I counted wrong. The extra directories take the excessive inodes.

You are correct. I use rsnapshot, which appears to use the same hardlinking technique to
generate its backups.

In this case, the directories on disk use up inodes, and for the purposes of inode consumption
they act very much like small files.