On 11/09/2015 11:34 AM, Valeri Galtsev wrote: > I wonder how filesystem behaves when almost every file has some 400 hard > links to it. (thinking in terms of a year worth of daily backups). Why do you think that would be a problem? Most inodes have one hard link. When that link is removed, the link count in the inode is decremented (inodes are reference-counted, you can see their ref count in "ls -l" output). When the link count reaches 0 and no open file descriptors exist, the inode is removed. Creating more hard links just increases the ref count. That's it. It's not a weird special case.