I started using Back In Time about a month ago and have it set to back up my "work" folder hourly. All went fine, until today when (after quite a bit of WTF on my part) I found that it had eaten up all my inodes. I had BIT set to use up to 2GB of space and keep backups for a year. It still had plenty of space but it had eaten up all the inodes on that partition.
I don't see any options in BIT's configuration that are related to inodes. How should I prevent this from happening in the future?
You can't that's not how ext4/3/2 works. If you have an odd block size then you will have fewer inodes and even really tiny files take 1 inode. So back in time, which makes copies of things will eat inodes till your out.
Now most of the time, you will run out of free space long before you run out of inodes. However that depends on block size. If you have a 1 gig block size (totally bogus but just go with it) your only going to be able to have 250 files/inodes on a 250 Gig hard drive. If you really want to correct the problem then reformat the file system and use a smaller block size. For back up dives I usually use mkfs -j -i 1024 -b 1024 -I 256 but that's just me.
sudo blockdev --getbsz /dev/sda1; it was 4096. I suppose I should add a partition and tell BIT to use that instead.