How much storage space do you give your users?

[b_m]

Hi

 

Could people post up to date details of the storage space that they give their student users please?

 

I'm regularly being told that students need to delete stuff- but when I check their user areas they're actually very reasonable, and there is nothing there to really be deleted.

 

The opinions seems to be that students can "make do" with user quotas of 50Mb (max, they start smaller than this!) but because they have roaming profiles, the various application settings files regularly run at between 20/ 30Mb, especially now our Art department have started using Photoshop on a regular basis, which seems to save a file called Brushes.psd to all users profile. On occasion, I have seen these files alone to be 25Mb.

 

I feel now that the days of student using only a few Mb as a user area have now gone. They (rightly) expect to use photos and audio in work, and they will take pictures etc using digital cameras, which of course produce much bigger files now than they did a few years ago due to the increased quality.

 

I'd be interested to know what different schools are now allocating as user area quotas-and also how you're backing this up in a manageable and affordable way.

 

Thanks for your time.

 

B-M

[bossman]

All staff = 500Mb

All students = 300Mb

 

Some serious staff who are IT literate 3Gb

 

All this is for their personal use as they also have staff subject areas which collectively add up to 2Tb

 

This is on our new system which has room for growth as our old system had just 348Mb of storage space left (timed it just right)

 

This is all backed up using Backup Exec 12.5 D2D2T Diskbox 4Tb storage and then to LT04Autoloader tape storage with magazine which holds 24 tapes each holding 1.2Tb each compressed.

Edited February 24, 2011 by bossman

[plexer]

We had one staff member with 37gb

 

Ben

[bossman]

@plexer:

 

Bet he was using it for downloading free apps (hehe! torrents) ;D

[gaz350]

Our librarian had a 250gb home folder. She does lot of radiowaves though.

[clareq]

Some of our sixth form students who study art and photography have a 2Gb limit - and can easily fill it! Most students have less though.

[dgsmith]

We start Yr7 on 50MB and work up each year in increments of 50MB (so yr8 get 100MB, yr11 get 250MB). Staff start on 1GB and we're flexible as long as any requests made are justified. Unlike student accounts where we feel justified to check what they have saved if they request more, we respect staff privacy so just trust them generally and this works well.

[b_m]

Thanks to all posts to far.

 

I forgot to ask, could people also mention whether they are using static profiles, or roaming profiles- and if roaming do the files that make up the profile count as part of the students quota?

 

Thanks again.

[CyberNerd]

I think it's around 5.2GB per user + around 7GB of mail.

Google docs of course. Non Google docs (psd etc) are limited to 1GB IIRC

 

Local limits (shared CIFS drives) are more like 1.2GB for KS5 down to 700MB for KS3.

[pete]

There's no limit per user (as such). It's a case of "the space is there for you to use, but don't take the michael or do stupid things like having multiple copies of the same directory structure". If they're using a lot of space and it's all legitimate school work, then that's fine - if it's not they'll be asked to tidy. It all balances out - some kids (Art and Engineering students, I'm looking at you) are heavy consumers of storage, but the Maths, English and Geography kids aren't. So long as I don't get a year where everyone takes GCSE and A-Level art, it's all fine.

 

My rule of thumb is I know roughly how much an average student will be using in a certain year group. I then look at those kids who are outside the curve to see if it's legitimate or daftness.

 

Mandatory profiles with certain things redirected to the userdir.

 

Disclaimer: I do have filtering set up on the fileserver that prevents the saving of certain file types. So media studies (for example) keep their .dv files on their own server.

Edited February 25, 2011 by pete

[joe90bass]

year 7 = 150MB

Year 8+9 = 200MB

Year 10+11 = 300MB

6th Form = 500MB

Staff = 3.0GB

 

I'm always under pressure to increase these quota's (Damn DIDA!!), however if all users used the full quota they already have we'd be well and truly out of space.........

 

Backup - Autoloader drive with 3 x 200GB tapes (compressed). I suspect we'll be needing more tapes soon, ideally we could use a new backup solution but with no budget...........

Edited February 25, 2011 by joe90bass
add in backup info

[plexer]

@plexer:

 

Bet he was using it for downloading free apps (hehe! torrents) ;D

 

Nope she just had it filled up with loads of stuff from uni etc... oh and a copy of boardworks which I'm not sure about.

 

Ben

[cpjitservices]

Students 50MB Quotas, Admins 5GB, Tutors/Lec's 1GB, Guests 50MB

 

And we are seriously struggling for space.....................

[dhicks]

I'd be interested to know what different schools are now allocating as user area quotas-and also how you're backing this up in a manageable and affordable way.

 

For the storage servers I set up last summer, I aimed to give each pupil 8GB, the same as you can get on a cheap USB stick these days - I figured that would do as a basic minimum. More would be available for older pupils (sixth form) and staff. We had one 16TB (ish - 9 2TB disks in RAID 5, anyway) live file server with a hardware RAID array backed up by a second 22TB (12 2TB disks) software RAID machine - the second server larger than the first so we could save historical versions of files.

 

We also had separate servers for images (4TB, I think) and video (another 4TB, also with a four-port network card on its own dedicated network, for serving an 18-machine "media" classroom).

 

Building a storage server is simply a case of buying a bunch of harddrives and sticking them in a case, there's not an awful lot to it. The above can be built for around £5,000, including a decent (£1,000-ish) hardware RAID card and a couple of spare 2TB drives to allow for fast replacement of any disks that fail in your RAID array.

[Mr.Ben]

I'm giving Students 3GB Hard Quotas and Staff 6GB Soft Quotas. I also regularly approach Staff members and help them to archive data to DVD (Generally Photos and Media from previous years).

 

Much like Banks I look at it in 'fractional reserve' terms - Not all Staff and Students will want all of there quota at the same time, so I can lend extra space to other users if it is justified. However I do appreiciate that given the current state of the Banks that may well be folly!

Edited February 25, 2011 by Mr.Ben

[srochford]

50Mb sounds pretty small -as you say, there are apps that can dump nearly that much stuff without you doing anything remotely "wrong"

 

It's relatively cheap to buy more disc space but it gets more expensive when you factor in backups (and think through "how fast could I restore this when it all goes horribly wrong) and "cheap" is always an unhelpful term when you've got no money at all!

 

Those who were at Microsoft yesterday saw the presentation about Office 365 (Microsoft Office 365 - Online Services & Hosted Software in the Cloud) - this isn't actually available yet but it may be something schools could look at. I've no idea about what sort of SLA you get with the free service but it does give 25Gb of space which might be suitable for some things (but then you get issues of how you get 25Gb of data per user to and from the cloud!)

 

Not expecting any sympathy, but it all gets much harder with university students - we have individuals here who have >4Tb of data each and storage for that is just a little bit challenging :-)

[b_m]

Hi,

 

Thanks for all posts so far. As many people have commented, space per se isn't the issue,. but backups can be more tricky.

We're currently running 2 servers on our curriculum domain, students spread across the 2 servers (Year 7, 9, 11 on one, 8 and 10 on the other).

 

Both servers have a single LTO tape drive for backup. I believe that this is where the issue lies.

 

Should we be looking at a different backup solution- and if so, what would people suggest?

 

Thanks,

 

b_m

[dhicks]

Should we be looking at a different backup solution- and if so, what would people suggest?

 

Get / build a server with a larger storage capacity than the server(s) you want to back up - say mayb 1.5 - 3 times larger. Then have rsync copy the files from your two live file servers nightly (or maybe hourly, depending on how you want to work) to your new backup server. Have a script run on the backup server to de-duplicate those files and make versioned backups, so one folder for yesterday, last week, last month, etc. This way, you can have a file share available for users to simply copy previous versions of their files off - you can even mount it as another Windows drive letter, there's no need for them to have to come to you to restore any backed-up files.

 

If you want to be able to take files off-site or have them placed in a fire safe, add some removeable harddrive caddies or eSATA drives to your backup server and have the backups duplicated on there.

[jcollings]

We start everyone off with 500Mb but up it for students on request (mainly media or tech courses). They also have space on our share point VLE which is pretty well unlimited.

 

Staff have whatever they need. I think 20Gb is about the biggest so far (not including departmental shared areas). Again they all have space on the VLE to.

[Sylv3r]

We currently run unlimited quotas for both staff and students and they don't get abused. We are moving across to a SAN solution over the next few months and will probably implement quota's but will remain quite high.

 

Probably 1GB per student and 5gb per member of staff. Those students studying media, art, graphics and ICT in our sixth form are close to around 5gb and will have their accounts increased accordingly.

[b_m]

We currently run unlimited quotas for both staff and students and they don't get abused. We are moving across to a SAN solution over the next few months and will probably implement quota's but will remain quite high.

 

Probably 1GB per student and 5gb per member of staff. Those students studying media, art, graphics and ICT in our sixth form are close to around 5gb and will have their accounts increased accordingly.

 

We start everyone off with 500Mb but up it for students on request (mainly media or tech courses). They also have space on our share point VLE which is pretty well unlimited.

 

Staff have whatever they need. I think 20Gb is about the biggest so far (not including departmental shared areas). Again they all have space on the VLE to.

 

Hi,

 

You clearly have far advanced infrastructures compared to us! Could you give details of your backup solutions? Thanks so much for your time!

[zag]

I don't enforce any quotas but the average student has about 60mb in there. I regularly clean out mp3, zips or video files though.

 

Staff range from 100mb to 5gb but I send polite emails every so often to big users.

 

Total backup for the school is around 280gb which is very reasonable.

[AngryTechnician]

Staff get 1GB by default and rarely go over it. So far I've not had to raise anyone's quota; the few who've had emails from the storage server telling them they are maxed out soon found something to get rid of. I also encourage staff to store things on the shared drives instead, which are not quota'd. In general this isn't abused as staff are remarklably reluctant to expose the unnecessary junk they store to their colleagues.

 

Pupils get 100MB. Astonishingly, no student has ever filled their 100MB in the time I've been here. We only go up to Year 8 though. Also, AppData doesn't count towards their limit.

 

Backup for the entire server infrastructure (including full OS backups) is on a 3TB iSCSI NAS. It's about half full at the moment. The user data backups on their own (all staff, pupils, and shared areas) use just under 700GB.

Edited February 26, 2011 by AngryTechnician
Add backup data figures