Public folder sprawl

[BJG]

The system of staff shared folders has become pretty messy here. Any tips to control the sprawl...? Is it common to put quotas on departmental folders, for instance, or run reports on things like disk space usage by owner...?

[derf]

I had to lock down creating in the root folders, apply quotas to all the folders, and to stop any tampering apply security groups per department for subject/ks folders. In the process of starting to migrate to gSuite team drives, not sure how much will end up there though.

[Steve21]

Generally the top level of folders are restricted to departments, so maths can only write to maths etc.

 

We then have a generic "dump/other" folder that's free-play but it gets locked every year or so and a new one created, after 2nd year the old one gets deleted so people need to move stuff they need across. (In reality it gets super hidden for awhile before deleting but shuush don't tell! )

 

Steve

[korifugi]

We lock down departmental folders to only that department, lock down writing to the top level (so no folders can be created anywhere outside their own messes) and mostly leave them to it.

 

The rest is really down to training them to good working practices - I've had to explain to quite a few staff that there is a finite limit on a filepath, but that usually manages to get around that department quickly and the issue dies down.

 

As for messy areas, gentle steering of the more I.T. literate members of departments usually helps - but nothing short of a cluebat will help some of the main offenders.

[NetworkServices]

We block the creation of files/folders in the root and then apply security permissions to the subfolders. I think trying to keep it tidy is not the job of the IT guys, though. How are we supposed to know what to keep and what is still relevant? In fact even most of the teaching staff won't have a clue since the majority of the content is accumulated from maybe three or four of their predecessors ago. In the end you inevitably end up in the situation where you've got a terrabyte of data and nobody knows who put it there or why. We even tried creating a second share and asked the staff to copy over only what they needed from the original to the new so we could weed out what was no longer needed. It ended up being an exact copy of the original. They thought they needed everything. A bit like the monkeys and the electric shock experiment.

[DSapseid]

I have a defined list of 6-10 folders in the root of the shared area, some of these have defined folders in (eg Departments Folder in root has a set list of departments in it that cant be changed). Once they are in the folders there are no restrictions on most folders, only on the folders that relate to sensitive areas are restricted. Finance & HR have there own share for anything confidential that only 2 people have access to.

 

We have a lot of people here who teach in multiple departments and if they have to cover anyone else then it gets irritating so we 'trust' the teachers to not delete each others work. I have Shadow Copy turned on and is backed up into the cloud so if anything does happen then i can get it back.

 

Looking into potentially locking it down more though what those four letters (GDPR) that we all so love coming soon! so will follow this thread with interest.