Userarea Sizes

[timbo343]

Hello all.

 

Just a quick question and just want to get an idea of what people do for user area sizes.

 

Do you quota any userareas and what are your limits?

 

The only reason why i ask is because we have a media course that is taking the when it comes to saving movie files, some user areas are nearly 8gb plus we have to back this data up on a night time and they see what the problem is.

 

Anyways, what are your limits.

 

Thanks

 

Tim

[TronXP]

Students get 500Mb to start off with and can be increased to 1Gb

 

Staff get 1Gb to start of with and can be increased to 2 Gb

 

We are looking into increasing this though.

[ozzy]

How do you do your storage now? Would you be better off with a NAS box dedicated to the media stuff? or do you have one already. The staff get 2gig and pupils 1gig and they are managed with disk quota's but we have a terastation for large media files, images ect. bit like a big dumping ground but people tend to manage it well and delete stuff that they no longer need.

[IGB]

Staff get 5Gb

 

Years 7 & 8 get 150 Mb

Years 9 get 250 Mb

Year 10 & 11 get 500 Mb

Year 12 & 13 get 1 Gb

 

Photography students get an extra 1 Gb

Graphics students get an extra 1 Gb

Media students get an extra 4.5 Gb

 

Should a year 12/13 do Photography, Graphics and Media courses they will get 7.5 Gb of space.

 

All quotas are set on the servers, we also have file restrictions so that no DVD files can be copied onto these areas but we do have a dumping ground where such stuff can be submitted for conversion to a more appropriate format.

[Gibson335]

Funny...10 years ago the quota was 12Mb for our 1500 students...now they start with 750 and, provided they can prove that nothing in their area can be deleted, can apply for an increase when the limit is reached.

 

Staff have no quota - read into that what you will...but it's the 200 staff who have the SAN!!

[tmcd35]

One of the big (ok 5 minute) jobs I've done since starting here is getting rid of all quota's. Too draconian and largly not required. I'll worry when they start to fill up the available space.

 

Putting in a (min.) 3Tb NAS/SAN next year so it may be some time...

[bmdixon]

Students get 1GB with a automatic bump to 1.5GB if they hit it. We get an email telling us that it's been increased and we then go an delete the music/videos/photos/ etc that is filling up their area. Once they go beneath 1GB their quota is reset back down to 1GB.

Only just implemented this so yet to see how it works but not having too many problems so far...

[Gibson335]

One of the big (ok 5 minute) jobs I've done since starting here is getting rid of all quota's. Too draconian and largly not required. I'll worry when they start to fill up the available space.

 

Putting in a (min.) 3Tb NAS/SAN next year so it may be some time...

 

Can't agree that it's draconian...encourages discipline with file management, which can only help in their own and potential employment use, surely...unless they become a teacher, of course ;-)

[IGB]

One of the big (ok 5 minute) jobs I've done since starting here is getting rid of all quota's. Too draconian and largly not required. I'll worry when they start to fill up the available space.

 

Putting in a (min.) 3Tb NAS/SAN next year so it may be some time...

 

Tried that but they just ground the servers to a halt.

 

As punishment and to prove a point I kept the servers offline for 2 days so no one had access to their files whilst I set up quotas.

Not draconian, a nescesery evil unfortunately as we'd run for 2 years without quotas but it got out of hand. One student was using 67 Gb of space whilst our staff shared area was less than that.

[timbo343]

We still have user areas on the servers but use the NAS boxes as backups. Just out of interest, do you backup your media files?

 

I was thinking along the lines of a terastation, but no one will buy one.

 

Our limits are:

Year 7 - 9 100 Mb

Year 10 - 250Mb

Year 11 - 300Mb

Year 12 & 13 - 3Gb

[Gibson335]

Students get 1GB with a automatic bump to 1.5GB if they hit it. We get an email telling us that it's been increased and we then go an delete the music/videos/photos/ etc that is filling up their area. Once they go beneath 1GB their quota is reset back down to 1GB.

Only just implemented this so yet to see how it works but not having too many problems so far...

 

We get the users to do the work themselves...they have to prove to a teacher and us that everything in their area needs to be retained...only then do we increase.

[bmdixon]

We'll see how it goes - if it gets too much to manage then we will remove the automatic increase and leave them to it!

[Gibson335]

We still have user areas on the servers but use the NAS boxes as backups. Just out of interest, do you backup your media files?

 

I was thinking along the lines of a terastation, but no one will buy one.

 

Our limits are:

Year 7 - 9 100 Mb

Year 10 - 250Mb

Year 11 - 300Mb

Year 12 & 13 - 3Gb

 

We back up legit media files...these files are stored in a specific area, and anything outside that area we exclude media files from the backup...we then backup the media area to a NAS, with data etc backed up normally.

[mjs_mjs]

We're extreemly stingy, users start with 30MB and only go up if they need to/i do bulk resets to the nearest 10MB. we only have years 7 to 11 and most year 11's have 150MB to 200MB sizes. School has 750 pupils and total student areas add up to less than 50GB.

[tmcd35]

Can't agree that it's draconian...

 

Sorry. Should clarify. The limits we had set here were very draconion. All users 100mb regardless. Have 200Gb file server with 20Gb space used. It was silly, especially as people were running out of space.

 

Students work were deleted at the end of every year. WTF?

 

No, I'd rather tackel the problem rather than set silly limits. I have set the log on script to delete certain file extentions (mp3, swf, etc). I periodically look at folder sizes in TreeSize Pro. If someone is taking the p***, I take the necerssary action - delete files, report to head of year, etc.

Edited March 20, 2010 by witch

[pete]

snip weird double-post Edited November 12, 2009 by pete

[pete]

The rough quota is 200MB-400MB, but it's a soft quota - nothing happens if it's exceeded, it's just to give me an idea of growth in disk usage.

 

Assuming every user used an equal amount of space, they could have ~500MB each before I needed to buy more storage. While we have some art students with 8 gig homedirs, we have sixth formers who've struggled to fill 50 megs over 7 years, so it balances out.

 

The storage is there to be used, provided usage beyond ~400MB is school-related. Only two people have quotas and that's because they're idiots.

[timbo343]

We're extreemly stingy, users start with 30MB and only go up if they need to/i do bulk resets to the nearest 10MB. we only have years 7 to 11 and most year 11's have 150MB to 200MB sizes. School has 750 pupils and total student areas add up to less than 50GB.

 

Bloody hell.... your doing well.

[jcs808]

Just to go off topic a bit. How do you back up your data. I'm struggling to backup about 800 gig (staff & students) every week end.

 

We have an annex which houses some classrooms and our workshop where we have a dell poweredge server that backups up to disc. Using NT backup and a fibre connection to the rest of the school it is taking about 4 days to backup the 800 gig.

 

Anyone got any advice?

[Gibson335]

Just to go off topic a bit. How do you back up your data. I'm struggling to backup about 800 gig (staff & students) every week end.

 

We have an annex which houses some classrooms and our workshop where we have a dell poweredge server that backups up to disc. Using NT backup and a fibre connection to the rest of the school it is taking about 4 days to backup the 800 gig.

 

Anyone got any advice?

 

We have a Quantum unit for each network (Curric and Admin), the latest of which does 800gb native. We also back up a media area to a separate NAS. Unless you want to spend a fair bit of money, you could look at staggering the backup into several sections so that something different gets backed up each night, but that over a week it all does.

[tmcd35]

I back up on to a NAS box. I do a fall backup once a year. The rest are all incremental/differencial. Since it's all going to the same NAS box I can't see the point in making multiple backups of the same document to the same media.

[mjs_mjs]

Bloody hell.... your doing well.

 

Indeed - we're struggling this year so i'll be adding space perodically at maybe 500MB a day say to keep up with the growing needs. But at the moment at this size it is impacting learning. following on from other post, we do a full backup each friday to disk and to tape, with full backups of sims and exchange daily. Reason being, sims is small so it's just easier to do it daily, and exchange was taking longer to do a differential than a full, so it had to be changed. Our total storage is 582GB last time we looked, of which 70 was the students server, 105 being the staff server (admins excluded), 40 for exchange and 29 for sims.

 

One thing to note is that no two schools will be the same due to different courses and different ways of teaching.

[maniac]

Just to go off topic a bit. How do you back up your data. I'm struggling to backup about 800 gig (staff & students) every week end.

 

We have an annex which houses some classrooms and our workshop where we have a dell poweredge server that backups up to disc. Using NT backup and a fibre connection to the rest of the school it is taking about 4 days to backup the 800 gig.

 

Anyone got any advice?

 

That's very slow. I backup about 350GB to tape in about 10 hours (including verification) for a full backup on a Friday, and do differntial backups for the rest of the week.

 

I'm not sure that NT backup may be your problem, I don't know how well it handles large jobs like this. We use Veritas 11d here, which does the job nicely once you've got it configured correctly. There's also a whole host of other problems it could be from issues with the fibre, to issues with one or other of the servers, disk problems or other tasks getting in the way of the backup running properly. It would be well worth running some experiments like moving the backup server temporarily to a new location to see it it's any quicker, or splitting the backups for different servers into seperate jobs to see if it's just one specific server slowing the thing down, maybe try a different server to back up to, incase it's a problem with the backup server. I'm pretty sure you can get it to work a lot quicker than it is now!

 

Mike.

[mjs_mjs]

Just to go off topic a bit. How do you back up your data. I'm struggling to backup about 800 gig (staff & students) every week end.

 

We have an annex which houses some classrooms and our workshop where we have a dell poweredge server that backups up to disc. Using NT backup and a fibre connection to the rest of the school it is taking about 4 days to backup the 800 gig.

 

Anyone got any advice?

 

start looking for bottlenecks.

 

1.) reading data is too slow,

2.) netwrok bandwidth is limiting the speed,

3.) writing to disk is too slow.

 

Also look for what servers are taking the most time. Do they run sequentially or all at once in parallel?

 

If we assume that you can read at 100MB/s max then backup would take 33 hours minimum.

[localzuk]

No quotas here. We've got 610 kids, years 5 - 8, and about 50 staff who actually put things on the server.

 

Kids files take up 14.5GB, Staff 114GB.

 

Space is so cheap now, I can't see it being an issue. We have the capacity for 1TB of storage, but only really enough backup space for 200GB or so. Not an issue, so long as people don't make duplicates of everything.