Staff Home Directory Size - How big do you allow?

[gtg93]

So recently we've been having some issues with staff laptops that have 128GB SSDs where their Offline files cache fills them up. I'd assumed the issue was because multiple members of staff had logged on but it turns out not, and in fact we have many members of staff with 100GB+ home directory (One member of staff at 175GB). Our Win10 image is small too, with literally only Office, Foxit Reader, SIMS, SMART Notebook, 7Zip and VLC Player installed.

 

This seems utterly ridiculous to me (bearing in mind this is a primary school, so no specialist media teachers etc), and is causing a headache for those who only have 128GB SSDs (and me having to clear the offline files cache each week as they won't delete any work).

 

My query is, do you set a limit? If so of how much, and why did you/the school believe this was a sufficient amount? Is it a soft or a hard limit? Personally I thought 10GB would be enough, and photos etc could go on the shared drives, however it seems a small percentage of our staff home directories are already below this size.

 

 

*I know this has been asked before, but not for a while and obviously space requirements change.

[strawberry]

Best bet is to evaluate what people are storing and educate them. If it's personal stuff then find an alternative plan ( Maybe a partition, a usb stick or plainly use their own equipment) . If they are storing media files then resize or convert them and give them the tools to do it themselves.

[atcoates]

That does seem excessive. None of my users have ever gone over 10gb and that was just for a video project. Have they got lots of media files etc?

[Oaktech]

1gb. No offline files cache. Online or not at all.

[Joanne]

So I search the server for large files and see what I finds. Sometimes you will have to remove a lot of stuff because it shouldn't be there (read: 4GB movie files). I archive stuff all the time, so if I find a staff member has stuff that hasn't been touched since the 1990's, I archive and if they need it, I can get it back.

[6Foot2]

None. Not for want of trying, was told not to apply a limit to staff.

 

[Jayellcee]

We have no limit set but we have disabled offline files, so we don't have a problem with sizes.

[Joanne]

Slightly off topic, but relevant... if you disable offline files, but have OneDrive, can the user still log on while offline without loads of error messages?

[DJ-1701]

Slightly off topic, but relevant... if you disable offline files, but have OneDrive, can the user still log on while offline without loads of error messages?

 

Offline Files and OneDrive are completely different technologies so one would not effect the other.

 

As I understand it...

Offline Files caches a UNC path and pretends it's going there.

OneDrive (the latest version) has file pointers to download the file if it's not already downloaded.

[synaesthesia]

I'd only ever spec 240gb drives for staff laptops using offline files however even then I'd be looking at better methods; if using Office365 or google Apps there's 2 systems there automatically which can resolve the problem by using Drive/OneDrive as appropriate.

[gtg93]

Thanks all... Unfortunately, looking through their documents there's nothing massively out of the ordinary (movies / tonnes of music / holiday photos) at least for the majority, but some have 15/20 years of work on there that for some reason they've never deleted.

 

Unfortunately, we're midway through merging with a trust so OneDrive/GDrive are out of the question at the minute.

 

Either way, offline files or not, 100GB is a silly amount of storage in my opinion for lesson resource etc. They have been spoken to a few times about it but never remove files. The plan was to possibly introduce a soft limit, then give them x weeks to get below it before changing it to a hard limit.

 

 

Out of interest, those who don't use Offline Files, how do your staff login at home/offsite? Do they not login with their network credentials or are you logging into the domain at school with your Microsoft account?

[mthomas08]

We install 250GB SSDs for staff and 120GB SSDs for students.

 

Sometimes it is multiple profiles, software storing in my docs or simply other cache bits and pieces.

[Joanne]

Out of interest, those who don't use Offline Files, how do your staff login at home/offsite? Do they not login with their network credentials or are you logging into the domain at school with your Microsoft account?

 

This is what I'm curious about too, so I've just disabled offline files and logged onto a laptop which I disconnected from the wifi and I get the old "Windows cannot access \\server\staff home\username\desktop" error.

 

Is there a way to suppress these messages?

[Oaktech]

Offline files are disabled serverside here. If the machine can't connect the drive is not there. Direct Access either works or it doesn't and uses domain credentials. Otherwise, RDP is the way. OneDrive, is just well, OneDrive.

[forkies]

We have a 40GB limit for staff, this is to prevent offline file sync filling up which is set via GPO to a percentage of their SSD space usually around 85GB, they all have 240GB ssd but we also role out a larger image than you and want free space should another user log in and get offline sync.

Our largest user is 55GB were we have manual raised the limit but majority of staff sit below 15GB. We encourage are staff to put shared resources in a network share accessible to other staff to avoid duplicating files which are slightly outdated across various home areas.

[dmiddlebrough]

10GB limit for staff. We encourage all teaching resources to be saved to the departmental network share and photos/videos have a separate dedicated network share. When we first imposed the limit we had to devote some INSET time to allow staff to transfer files to more appropriate locations and have a general "tidy up".

[chrisakak9]

8GB hard limit on staff and 1GB hard limit on students various other limits throughout group shares.