Introducing Disk Quotas to Staff

[X-13]

Again, if only life were that easy.

 

I do not have the authority to unilaterally remove files, and I have been given no such authority by my SLT. I send out reminders and warnings by the dozen, but they are ignored because they know nothing will really be done about it.

 

If you have such powers or are supported that well by SLT then more power to your elbow - sadly, our teaching staff are pretty much untouchable. This is the same, by the way, when it comes to potentially (probably) illegal music files!!

 

...How technical are your teachers/SMT?

 

You could drop a lot of FUD in your explaination, or just script it and blame an auto-update on the server. [Make sure you say you can't remove it before they ask.]

 

Disclaimer: The previous statement was intended in jest. Any loss of job security encountered due to following it is not my problem. [seriously, don't actually do this unless you don't care about being fired.]

[Gibson335]

...How technical are your teachers/SMT?

 

You could drop a lot of FUD in your explaination, or just script it and blame an auto-update on the server. [Make sure you say you can't remove it before they ask.]

 

Disclaimer: The previous statement was intended in jest. Any loss of job security encountered due to following it is not my problem. [seriously, don't actually do this unless you don't care about being fired.]

 

Believe me, I'd like to ;-)

[X-13]

Believe me, I'd like to ;-)

 

You also have the ability to obfuscate your true intent by using a lot of tech-speak, not that I would suggest it. Or playing to the finance side of things by pricing up what more storage is actually going to cost. [if you need new kit.]

 

Providing you have permission in writing [or email] then there should be no/little fallout.

 

Much as I thought staff would hate the quotas set up here, which they did, they actually got over it pretty fast... Too fast, now that I think about it.

 

 

Le EDIT: The more I post here, the more BOFH I seem to be...

Edited April 23, 2013 by X-13

[psydii]

We introduced one here with no consultation. HOWEVER, the year before they had been constrained by a 250Gb volume for everything, so when they got 2TB some went a bit wild, while others just got on and discovered they could now actually work.

 

Once a few people had crossed the 25Gb mark, I took a look. Most were careless with copies of copies of copies of folders. Some were justifiable (music and videos and photos). We set an alarm at 25GB and respond based on our best judgement. Nobody complains. Apart from the person who has a 100Gb limit who manages to need a new laptop every couple of months - dear god, one day we'll remember to plug it in to the switched network before syncing her files.

[lmgtfy]

@dgardner I know what this can be like. Luckily we have always had limits on staff and students home folders but the biggest one we had to deal with recently was email mailboxes. A few years ago staff had unlimited size email accounts with some users having over 10GB of emails and refusing to archive or delete old emails. We have 250 staff accounts let alone the students so the way we sold it to the management here was the time it would take to do a full restore in a disaster recovery instance. We have moved on a bit now and have a SAN etc so backup's and restores are faster anyway but there is no way we could give space's allocations like some of the people have mentioned in the thread. Staff get 300MB in their home drive, 300MB mailbox, 1GB archive mailbox and unlimited(ish) access in staff shared folders. All I can say is thanks goodness for Server 2012 deduplication.