Home Directory Sizes

[qcomer]

We are rebuilding our AD infrastructure and want to give the appropriate amount of space but not give too little nor too much. Right now I am wondering how much space is allotted for staff for their personal space on the file server.

 

We only redirect "documents" folders.

 

We will have FSRM turned on so staff will not be allowed to save image, video or music files in their my documents.

[6Foot2]

We don't control how much disk space staff use at the moment. I am trying to get SLT to agree to limits for staff at the moment as some staff are using in excess of 25GB!

 

This cannot continue.

[sukh]

Hi

 

Not sure really. It depends on your requirements from both the functional and non functional view. Some staff may have a requirement for large home areas which may be genuine, others may be abusing this.

 

Might be worth maybe keeping an eye on content in home areas instead.

 

If you have the space then no issues, if not then introduce a business policy, if staff still don't adhere to it , force the policy using technology.

 

For those staff that need extra space make an exception, however some staff may think of reasons to get additional space.

 

Need to get agreement with school and tell them either we need to enforce policy or need to purchase more storage to meet needs.

 

If you can't get more storage then do some calculations on your current storage and then calculate quotos for staff.

 

You can only work with what you have.

 

Sukh

[eddyc]

I think it really depends if your SLT will back you to enforce it. Usually we would just get a call to tell us that X cannot save their work and therefore increase their quota.

We gave up on quota. Some staff have literally 3-4mb worth of documents on the storage server, whilst other teachers (mostly music and media teachers) have documents which can be anywhere upto 20-30gb.

We recommend using the shared drives as much as possible but this isn't always convienient.

[qcomer]

I think it really depends if your SLT will back you to enforce it. Usually we would just get a call to tell us that X cannot save their work and therefore increase their quota.

We gave up on quota. Some staff have literally 3-4mb worth of documents on the storage server, whilst other teachers (mostly music and media teachers) have documents which can be anywhere upto 20-30gb.

We recommend using the shared drives as much as possible but this isn't always convienient.

 

Not sure what an SLT is. I think part of the problem is our department structures are a lot different in the US.

 

One major difference is I am IT Support for the whole district (11 schools - there are two of us). We dont use LEA's for anything IT related other than handing off our connection (they are our ISP).

 

We need to quota to efficiently to ensure proper volume usage.. We cannot monitor over 4000 user accounts (staff and students) daily to see who has how much - we just do not have that kind of time.

 

Media departments will have their own separate share for their multimedia or a NAS.

Edited April 6, 2011 by qcomer
edit

[eddyc]

SLT - Senior Leadership Team

SLG - Senior Leadership Group

 

Different schools seem to use either one or the other..

 

We do not use our LEA for anything other than our internet connection either.

[qcomer]

I have never heard of those. Are they your department manager? I also see that a lot of you only support one school often on here. Lucky! Lol

[zag]

I'd give everyone 1 gb, nice and easy to remember and storage is cheap these days.

[FN-GM]

I have never heard of those. Are they your department manager?

 

No they are the Headteacher, Deputy Heads, Assistant Heads, Business Managers. Basically the people who run the school.

[RTFM]

Doesnt it depend on what courses you run and what space you have available?

 

For example, we have a 12tb file server and run GCSE / Media courses where they save video, render etc etc. Some of the sixth form media students home drives are over 50gb once you've rendered etc.

 

It would make no sense in our situation to give pupils a 1gb limit and end up having 10tb of free space doing nothing as essentially you've wasted money buying disk space you'll never use.

 

Obviously if your not in that sort of position and your running on a limited amount of space (1 or 2 tb for example) and you have say 1500 kids and 200 staff, it becomes obvious that your going to have to limit space.

 

 

So yes, imo it totally depends on your circumstances, if you have bought a ton of disk space, why not use it? (obviously the more space you use, the more you have to backup, which is a linked topic but not specifically what was asked )

[buzzinh]

Our policy is all staff my documents areas are for non / semi-work related things. All of thier day to day work/deapartment documents and files are to be kept in the shared areas. It used to works quite well. Also makes thier reasources available if they are not in for a period of time (sick leave/maternity leave)

 

So technicaly a limit on user areas could enforce this.

[DAZZD88]

This is something I'd be interested in too. Myself and my colleagues, excluding one, would like to implement a quota.

 

My thoughts on this are, give staff and students maybe 1 or 2GB for their home areas and then any resources that are needed (video, audio, PDFs etc...) can be stored on either the staff departmental resource area or students shared area. Basically my view is that staff should have nothing but personal documents (work related) within their user areas. Anything to be used by other staff should be on a shared area, so that duplicates aren't created.

 

At the moment we have staff areas that can be as big (if not bugger than) 50GB. To me this is ridiculous. The staff memeber with the 50GB user area claims that a lot of that space is used for teaching resources...so why aren't they in your departmental share then?

[RTFM]

At the moment we have staff areas that can be as big (if not bugger than) 50GB. To me this is ridiculous. The staff memeber with the 50GB user area claims that a lot of that space is used for teaching resources...so why aren't they in your departmental share then?

 

What difference does it make between whether they have 50gb of work in their home drive or having it on their department share?

 

It's still 50gb regardless of where it is, at least if it is on their specific home drive they know it isnt going to be altered, deleted, over written, moved etc by another member of the department (accidentally ofcourse).

 

I dont really see the difference.....unless you have different storage for different areas e.g. a 4tb NAS for department shared and a 1tb NAS for home drives meaning you need them to store large amounts of data on the share not the dedicated home drive....

 

Also makes thier reasources available if they are not in for a period of time (sick leave/maternity leave)

 

Thats true, but if the documents were on their home drive and the member of staff was on long term sick, it isnt like you couldnt access the documents anyway.

 

Not to say a shared area for department resources isnt useful, we have that too but i dont think that should be a dumping ground for everything because their home drive is restricted. Your going to get the same stuff just dumped somewhere else where the individual isnt as accountable for it....

Edited April 7, 2011 by RTFM

[DAZZD88]

I dont really see the difference.....unless you have different storage for different areas e.g. a 4tb NAS for department shared and a 1tb NAS for home drives meaning you need them to store large amounts of data on the share not the dedicated home drive....

 

Thats basically it. Our staff area and the staff shared area are on two different boxes. I would also want staff to learn to use space efficiently. It's not difficult and in the long run it'll save us money.

[RTFM]

Thats basically it. Our staff area and the staff shared area are on two different boxes. I would also want staff to learn to use space efficiently. It's not difficult and in the long run it'll save us money.

 

Well that kind of makes sense then

 

As i said earlier, our storage is one 12tb fileserver (replicates to a backup server for redundancy) and we use about 2.5tb of it currently but we dont restrict home drive or shared area sizes.

[andydis]

can we add another poll, say 1-2GB 2-3GB 4-5GB , as this would be really interesting, we have an average of5GB but some are over 12GB!!! yes over! and staff training to explain why they shouldnt have their xmas photos from 2003 falls on deaf ears!

[RTFM]

Is it just use with A Leve media pupils who have H drives of 20gb+?

 

The raw and rendered footage kinda gets big when they have done a lot of filming and editing.....some of our pupils are taking media and film studies and have double the footage and rendering so they have drives 35gb+ (some of them, not all).

 

It's not like you can say "dont render" or "dont get anymore than 500gb of footage"......

 

It also isnt like you could put it onto a share to reduce the home drive sizes as its their coursework so you can't have other pupils able to do what they want to it......

 

What would people suggest for the above scenarios? (not necessarily for us, but for the OP or people who may be reading this in a similar position but have difficulties when it comes to space).

 

 

Edit;

 

Just been thinking about this myself and I suppose you could always have a quota for pupils but make exceptions for students on certain courses and have some sort of soft quota for them which alerts you to when they go over and you can monitor it but does allow them to exceed the limit........we do have a piece of software called "File Server Resource Manager" which i think is a MS plugin and that is quite good if people were interested. It monitors H drive sizes / quotas and also allows the blocking of certain file extensions from being saved to selected drives

Edited April 7, 2011 by RTFM

[psydii]

File Server Resource Manager is very useful. Though from memory doesn't do some things that NTFS quota fans rely on. At 2003R2 FSRM was best handled form the command line.

 

Isn't live@edu offering 25GB in the clouds these days? Generally I budget for 10GB per user, and keep an eye on overall consumption. You do have to make sure you have plenty of notice if your school has a tendency to offer new courses or try exciting stuff. 200 kids all using DSLRs without strategic planning can fill up your storage pretty quickly.

[qcomer]

Yeah we are looking at going Live@edu in the future for students. Right now we just do not have the time.

 

We have over 4,000 users and 11 schools for 2 IT Staff (thats TOTAL IT staff - we do everything from SQL, Exchange, IIS, Printers, Desktops, Wifis, AD, etc). We also do not do any "rendering" in our district or anything like that. The only thing remotely close is some yearbook classes and an audio class that use Sybelius and Pro Tools. They will have access to a NAS for their storage and even then the biggest files they have are like 5MB.

 

To give 4,000 users 1GB of storage is a lot to manage and back up.

[psydii]

2 staff across 11 sites?! No wonder the likes of RM are romping through contract wins in the US.

LTO4 is 800GB Native. So assuming local storage at each site, and no site with more than 800 users, with centralised MIS and Mail service, backing it up shouldn't be a technical challenge. I'd also hazard a guess that you've already got trained tape changers on each site, so that shouldn't be difficult either.

 

What do you use for your NAS? Would a centralised SAN be an option? In London inter-site 1Gb/s lines with multiple resiliency and redundancy have just become affordable making this viable consideration.

 

I am not familiar with the funding arrangements, or the demographics of your schools, however I would suggest that such limited disk space options is likely to be a limiting factor in how ICT is being used in the classroom. Digital Video and Photography are pretty much mainstream activities now, and even cameras in phones chew up gigs of space in no time at all. I'd be interested to see what your customers are actually doing on their sites.. are they living within the system's constraints (primarily central funding of staff such that there are only two people to manage the service for all of them) or are their lots of 'below' the radar works (random NAS's and non managed desktops etc) deployed and managed by the individuals schools?