Comment 5 for bug 397745

Instead of just fixing bugs that pop up, we can also "think ahead". Even though nobody has a 4Tb drive yet, we might prepare for the fact that a few years from now, they will be common.

Similarly, my report warns about the consequences of certain design decisions.

Yes, I have an extreme number of files. I've had "many files" for a long time. I remember my PC-XT hitting the 2000 files limit of "norton commander".

There are always people with "extreme" configurations that run into problems that normal people won't hit soon. But "what is normal" will grow. Ten years ago PCs had 20-30Gb of disk space and 1T was outrageous. Nowadays many new PCs come with a 1T disk.

How do I end up with that many files? I make backups. I use rsync to create a copy of my data. Then I cp -lr the data to a directory tagged with the current date. I end up with a copy of the filesystem at every backup-date. And files that don't change don't take up much space.

Thus I can look back at what my filesystem looked like at every point in time.

I believe backuppc does something similar (but it didn't exist/do this back when I started backing up like this).