Faculty File Server Quotas

Faculty File Server Quotas

Summary

Information Technology Services has a 600MB size limit on all faculty file server accounts (BSP-NAS). Users who are over this quota are notified by emails sent nightly to the Bethel email address of any faculty over the quota. There are two types of quotas - soft and hard. The soft quota is currently 600MB, while the hard quota is 1GB. A "super-user" status is available with a hard quota of 3GB upon consultation with an IT Consultant.

• Upon going above the soft quota, an automated email warning will be sent to you with the name of the top ten files in terms of storage size during the first three weeks. If you fail to reduce the size of your folder during the first 3 weeks then an automated incident will be created for you. At that time a person from ITS department will call you to facilitate the process.

• If a user is above the hard quota of 1GB, the user's home directory permissions are set to read and delete only, until it is brought below 600MB.

Faculty who have gone through the process of eliminating unnecessary files and still feel that they have a rationale for needing greater server storage than the 600MB quota should contact the faculty consultant to discuss an appropriate quota that the server can support. This may involve the need for a fee to be assigned for the additional server space.

Common Reasons for Being Over

For many faculty the original philosophy given us by ITS was that the safest way to protect our data was to store it in our personal folder. Faculty need to develop a new philosophy about what should be saved on the server.

Today many faculty are using multimedia like photographs, videos, and MP3 files which require huge amounts of server storage space. Presentations like Power Point with large amounts of graphics particularly those graphics that are not JPEG or GIF can also be take up a lot of space.

Outlook Express as well as Outlook archives are stored locally and are often very large files.

Faculty often have large files saved to their desktop which not only slows down the login process but also increases their server storage.

Archiving

Many users have a significant amount of data storage needs. If you are unsure about what you may need or have the need to retain more than 300 MB of data, we do provide ways for you to archive files to CD-R disks. There are CD burners on all of the new computers on campus. For those with older machines you can burn your files from the faculty lounge computer. If you need assistance with this process please contact the help desk.

Why 600MB?

Bethel's IT staff is always trying to balance what is needed by faculty against what it costs to store it. The current balance is a server that can provide 600MB of space per faculty member without getting too close to its maximum capacity. When this target is significantly exceeded, all faculty using the server are affected by slow response times and eventually a complete inability to store new data when the server is full. One of the biggest things that has to be considered is the difference between "online" and "offline" storage. Online storage is for files you need regular and ready access to, whereas offline storage is for files you are no longer using on a regular basis. Usonia2 is what is referred to as online storage, where CD archives are offline storage.

The biggest cost in maintaining reliable online storage is not the actual drives or even the redundant drives, but the backup tapes. Bethel runs backups on all the file servers every night that have the data that has changed since the previous night, and archives them in case of server disaster, accidental deletion, or file corruption. Every so often we have to do a full backup, which is a complete copy of everything. Backup tapes are not cheap, and we invest significant resources into maintaining complete backups to help ensure that important work is not lost. When people save large amounts of unnecessary data to the servers, Bethel's cost grows much faster than storage on a machine where backups are generally not performed (such as a home machine) or on offline/archival storage. You can help us keep cost low and help us justify allowing more space per faculty member if unnecessary or older files are archived to CD-R rather than storing them on the server.

If you have any questions or concerns, contact the ITS help desk at 651-638-6500 or visit http://helpdesk.its.bethel.edu/