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Website backup crippled by 1.6MB Friends GIF that was replicated 246,173 times, breaking Linux's EXT4 filesystem limit — Jennifer Aniston's 'happy dance' animation ate up 377 gigabytes of data due to security policy

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Tom's Hardware

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A single 1.6MB Friends GIF of Jennifer Aniston's 'happy dance' was replicated 246,173 times on a Discourse site, causing a backup bloat of 377GB and breaking the Linux EXT4 filesystem limit. The issue stemmed from an overuse of the GIF and a file security policy, which created multiple copies of the same file due to context changes. Discourse attempted fixes by tracking original content hashes and creating hardlinks, but faced challenges with the ext4 limit. Ultimately, a new fix was implemented to handle excessive duplicates more efficiently, ensuring smoother backup processes in the future.

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