Organisation of shared public folders

We have two main shared folder areas:

R:\ (resources) which staff can edit and pupils can read

U:\ (staff area) which only staff can access edit etc.


Both areas have had little or no housekeeping done on them for years.

We are looking at what strategy we can employ to force some tidying/deleting/re-structuring.

Wondered if anyone had gone through similar pain and what lessons you learnt.

I was thinking of creating a new file structure especially in the R:\ area that at the top level was just subject names, below that teachers initials and not allow any other folder creation by staff. This at least would give some accountability to the area.

Wondering also how best to move from the "mess" to a new structure...if we allow staff to just bulk move files/folders over...then little or no pruning will be done...but I don't want to be lumbered with hand-holding myself...

Can any software report to us the owners of files in the R:\ drive and we then bulk move those files to each new staff folder?

Comments/thoughts much appreciated.

We had a shared staff area which had grown to huge proportions over the years and to which staff had full access. I despaired about doing anything about it and all proposals to do some thing about it were met with the "But its so convenient", or "Thats how its always been...."

Last term we had a disc go weird in the server which resulted in many of the files on the drive being corrupted or inaccessable. We had a backup, but rather than just copy it all back we took the opportunity to start again.

We were quite restrictive on access permissions: created new folders for each department, with full access only to teachers in that department. Some limited access for certain admin staff to other folders. No-one with full access to the folder root. Then we told the staff that if they told us what they needed to copy back we would do so into the appropriate location.

Before disc failure the share was 169GB, after the dust had settled, 42GB, an all nicely organised, with no-one able to add crap into the share. After about two weeks requests to retrieve stuff from backup tailed off.

Conclusion: most of the stuff was redundant.
What you need is a disc failure.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kennysarmy

We have two main shared folder areas:

R:\ (resources) which staff can edit and pupils can read

U:\ (staff area) which only staff can access edit etc.

Both areas have had little or no housekeeping done on them for years.

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Sounds familiar, but count yourself lucky. Here they also insist on a shared folder with student write access.

we redid ours so that now everything appears as one drive for users, staff, student shared, software and an archive, are saved in there with folder for each department so that they cannot create folder in the root or the folders within the root, uses DFS alot and is heavily restricted down using ntfs permisions.

to get round the growing size - pick a sensible size and stick to it - when it runs out rather than expand get users to delete their old redundant work or you archive it on thir behalf.

we archived the existing shared areas and set it to read and delete only, meaning they can delet or move files but not add to the mess.. i plan to archive the remains of the archive to disk(s)- (dvd's) and store them i multiple locations at chrismass to free up the space for new things.

also use quota management to restrict staff individually using the shared area - alot think thats it's an extension to their my documents (hence the mess). a sensible limit that is appropiate and then you can easily track which users are abusing the area.

it's taken me 5 hours in total i reckon but worth it for the year. i plan on doing the same again next year.

Ahh the infamous shared drive... at least I'm not alone!

Even worse here as we have part time students who are slowly beginning to get user accounts now I've linked the 2 (separate) networks AD to the MIS system. I thought ours was bad going over a few GB but I feel a lot better now :p

I've found some weird stuff in there at times... best one has gotta be a head banging parrot with a weird high pitched Spanish tune in the background :bowl:

about 70GB here. 150 staff 750 students.

When we moved to our new network at the start of the summer, I created a completely blank shared drive, and shared the contents of the old drive as read only on a temporary drive letter.

Our new shared drives have a folder for each subject area in the root, and folders for various other things that are needed. Only network admins can create folders in the root, so that keeps it relatively well organised.

I've also structured it differently, as I hate having loads of drive letters, so students and staff both get a P:\ - the staffs P:\ is divided P:\STAFF and P:\STUDENTS the students P:\ starts at the 'Students' level. This keeps it all on one drive letter, much neater :)