I read a couple of articles about Linux inode and understand that each file created always have a corresponding inode number. Since one of our servers is using ext4 there is no way to increase the inode to an already running production server.
There are two solutions we can do one is to delete older files and the other is to transfer older files to another server and archive it.
My question now is if I archive and compress the files and then move it to another server. On the archive server how many inode number will be assigned to the compressed file I just transferred?
Answer
Collecting multiple files in a single archive file reduces inode consumption to that required to handle that file. The number of blocks used is not correspondingly guaranteed to be reduced (but it usually will be regardless).