How much space do you give teachers?

[sidewinder]

Ran a WinDirStat overnight as I noticed disk space was down to 19GB on the users drive, and it appears there are a number of teachers with well over 2GB of files, right up to 11.4GB (9.8 and 8.3 being the 2nd and 3rd)

 

Just space is getting pretty tight now, especially as I cant do anything major till half term

 

Do any of you limit the space teachers can use? Or just give them a friendly word when they go over a sensible limit?

 

Students are ok, I can delete rubbish from them, but teachers seem to believe its THEIR space and they can load as many GB of photos and music as they want

[plexer]

What does your AUP for staff say?

 

If you don't have one or it doesn't have anything in it about this then you need to go to SMT and ammend/create one then you can hit them over the head with it.

 

Ben

[Quackers]

We do not limit any users as such, we give all teachers and staff unlimited quota. If we then (like i did yesterday) find 800meg of MP3's in 1 students account i manually add a one of quota to them and delete the MP3's.

 

Staff i just ask them nicely to remove anything they do not need. With storage being so cheap now i do not see the need to force quota's on everyone, just those that take the piss.

[Netman]

How much space do you give teachers?

 

A flippin' wide berth mate....

 

[sidewinder]

[bossman]

I give the teachers who are not computer literate 100Mb which works out more than adequate and if they find they need more then i increase by 50Mb. Those teachers who have proved themselves trustworthy (because no matter how we look at it teachers will abuse the network more than the kids) i give them unlimited with the proviso that when i run an audit of user accounts if i find a teacher abusing his rights e.g mp3s, large bitmaps, etc i will put a cap on their account. Teachers are like magpies and pick up crap from all over their excuse is always "but i neeeeed it!" when you do an audit they have never used it since the day they copied it to their work area. How much does a teacher need. Kids at year 7 get 30Mb year 8 the same years 9,10 and 11 get 50Mb moving to 150Mb as coursework gets done in 20Mb increments.

[Disease]

Our teachers have unlimited space. We just reign them in if it gets to large.

[wesleyw]

150mb for year 7 climbimg to 300mb by the end of the sixth form. Teachers 500mb - 2gb we do have a couple of staff who have 17gb and 25gb in their areas the 17gb is full of scans and photos but seeing as it's the art department this isn't surprising as for the latter thats mostly maths vdeos he's been converting to a useable format I believe. Mine however is somewhere in the region of 70gb mostly ISO files though lol.

 

Wes

[mrforgetful]

I didn't have any limit on Staff from when we moved their areas to another server, but I've put it back this week as 1 teacher had 8Gb of music and 20Mb or work.

They now all have 500Mb and the students all start with 100Mb. If someone comes to me having run out of space then I'll run Treesize on their space and see what's takign it up, if it's work I don't moan I just stick another 50Meg on, if it's just music or crap I tell them to go away and delete that first.

I don't really have that many people need more space to be honest, and the less they have, the less to be virus infected.

I agree that disk storage is cheap these days, however backup solutions are still very expensive.

I do recommend everyone taking a look at the Treesize software though, very useful and cheap too. The fact I can limit it to certain file types is great and really scares the students when they see me drill down with extreme speed direct to their games!

[webman]

There's also backup media capacity to take into consideration when dishing out unlimited quotas, hence our 100Mb initial limit.

[Quackers]

There's also backup media capacity to take into consideration when dishing out unlimited quotas, hence our 100Mb initial limit.

 

I just have an old PC with big disks inside the PE building, everynight robo copy syncs everything up. So if the server died i could just redirect all the home dir paths to the server accross PE (or shares etc). So downtime would be next to nothing, if there is a fire the PE building is a seperate completly detached building so fire would not spread. Once every couple of months i do backup onto tape just for absoulute emergency.

 

For the backups of "i've deleted my work by accident" i just use Volume Shadow Copy, not only hassle free, but kids get the backups them selfs. No need for all these over priced and slow backup solutions. Cost of large SATA disks is peanuts.

[Disease]

We use a similar system here, we back up the curriculum network files onto a NAS which is mirrored.

 

Admin network backs up to tape on an Ultrium 3

[john]

Backup is the costly thing, Ultrium 1 only holds 200GB compressed (and TBH compression and my luck don't always go well together) so when users have totaled 100GB its time to squash them down a bit. All users get 100 to start with and grow as needed, personally I am not up to 70GB yet, but its a good few GB of stuff, and I keep my music and a lot of stuff on my PC in the office deliberatly to save the file server.

[Sylv3r]

Staff here get unlimited quota also.

 

The space is there so it might as well get used is my opinion.

[Norphy]

Staff get 250MB each and students get 50MB. Increases are only done if they are really really needed. 99.9% of the time, those limits are more than adequate. Seeing a student with 3 10MB word documents in their user areas does not elicit any sympathy from me

 

We have plenty of space on the file server but backup capacity is more limited. It is not just the file server that needs to be included in these backups, it is also the email server, sharepoint, SQL, SIMS and Bromcom so when we were designing our backup strategy we deliberately set these limits.

[sidewinder]

Seeing a student with 3 10MB word documents in their user areas does not elicit any sympathy from me

 

Thats nothing, Ive come across quite a few with 100MB word files! Just full of pictures they've pasted straight from a digital camera

Not a lot I can do about them though as they normally appear to be coursework...grrr

[myanonaccount]

as much as they want but we're gonna have to deal with media files synchronised from laptops cos the staff are using about 130gb atm

my boss in his wisdom decided to spread the userareas across 3 servers and not on separate partitions so quotaing things will cause problems with other non-userarea shares. doh!

[GrumbleDook]

Upgrade to Server 2003 R2 as soon as possible ... there is more fine tuning for quotas and file control ... worth the upgrade costs alone.

[kingswood]

We don't use quotas. A certain third-party told the school (before I got there) that they were bad, bad, bad. Mmmmmm. Then you look at all the trash they put in their areas and you wonder.

 

I think Tony is right though- upgrading to Server 2003 R2 gives much better control over quota allocation and file management than the previous incarnation.

[kingswood]

How much space do you give teachers?

 

A flippin' wide berth mate....

 

 

[myanonaccount]

our server installers/proviers dont support r2 atm so we're stuck

[craigmckay]

Teaching staff here have unlimited quota but we do keep a eye on who is taking what space up and act accordingly when required.

[Abaddon]

Unlimited for staff here, and they are currently up to 3.2 Terrabytes..

[clareq]

Talk about a vampire thread - thank heavens we now have disk deduplication - I looked at the properties of a user folder yesterday - size was in order of 120GB, space on disk, about 10Gb.

[forkies]

We limit staff to 40gb standard and we have two staff over that.

 

Students are limited 100mb, 500mb, 1gb, 2gb, 5gb, 10gb. In 7,8,9,10,11,12/13. Some of our students have 80gb due to taking media courses.

 

We currently hold around 3.8TB of documents. We also have shared resources at about 80gb for students to access from staff and 40gb on a staff resource share.

 

Our admin staff have various shared drives which build up to around 200gb. We also have scanned documents (student/staff files) at about 50gb.

 

So far we are ok on storage but we have seen a dramatic increase in documents over the years due to media courses. We keep leavers documents for 7 years on backup devices, each "leaving year" which includes any leaving staff or student plus Year 11 inclusive (even if returning to sixth form) and Year 13 (even if retaking) comes to about 1.8TB.

 

We have a 16TB SAN and two 8TB backup NAS devices in separate locations in secure areas of the school to backup all data to.

 

If you wanted to know about email, our students are all limited to 50mb, they have means of accessing data other ways than emailing it. Staff have 1gb standard although some staff such as BM and me have 10gb or may exceed this in some cases. This is due to the need to keep all emails for purposes of proof and evidence.

 

The whole email server uses around 300gb. (960 students, 150 staff ish).

 

Hope this helps.