I am not quite sure where the breaking point is but I think part of the problem is that the directories start to get big. The directory hierarchy is only 5 to 10 nodes deep. Its running on xfs. On 5/4/20 10:38 AM, ac wrote:

Hi Alvin,

On a 2TB dataset, with +-600k files, I have piped tree to less with limited joy, it took a few hours and at least I could search for what I was looking for... - 15TB and 100M is another animal though and as disk i/o will be your bottleneck, anything will take long, no?

now, for my own info/interest, can you tell me which fs is used for this ext3?

On Mon, 4 May 2020 09:55:51 -0400 Alvin Starr via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

...

I am hoping someone has seen this kind of problem before and knows of a solution. I have a client who has file systems filled with lots of small files on the orders of hundreds of millions of files. Running something like a find on filesystem takes the better part of a week so any kind of directory walking backup tool will take even longer to run. The actual data-size for 100M files is on the order of 15TB so there is a lot of data to backup but the data only increases on the order of tens to hundreds of MB a day.

Even things like xfsdump take a long time. For example I tried xfsdump on a 50M file set and it took over 2 days to complete.

The only thing that seems to be workable is Veeam. It will run an incremental volume snapshot in a few hours a night but I dislike adding proprietary kernel modules into the systems.

-- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin@netvel.net ||