# Data usage **URL:** \ **Category:** Chatting over the Back Fence\ **Created:** [December 10, 2013, 6:57pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871 "2013-12-10T18:57:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![System1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/51bf81/32.png) [@System1](https://forums.suse.com/u/System1)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 6:57pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/1 "2013-12-10T18:57:03Z")
So, all you sysadmins. Do you have any suggestions for getting [L]users to clean up obsolete, duplicated, unnecessary files, or have you all succumb to just adding more and more storage, increasing backup times, etc etc to keep the idiot masses happy never having to delete _ANYTHING_ ? – Stevo ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/suse/original/2X/5/5012ba89e3ffb5220dac47d5ea0ba032e2fe1cb6.png) [@system](https://forums.suse.com/u/system)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 7:24pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/2 "2013-12-10T19:24:59Z")
Quota? Little scripts to find duplicates based on a checksum to run periodically and link where necessary? – Good luck. If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface, show your appreciation and click on the star below… ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/suse/original/2X/5/5012ba89e3ffb5220dac47d5ea0ba032e2fe1cb6.png) [@system](https://forums.suse.com/u/system)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 7:37pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/3 "2013-12-10T19:37:26Z")
Stevo: With storage being so inexpensive, comparatively, to the cost of having people clean up their files, I’d go for adding storage. 🙂 – Susan Novell Community Chat Moderator [http://forums.novell.com/faq.php?faq=novfor#faq\_rules](http://forums.novell.com/faq.php?faq=novfor#faq_rules) [http://www.ncci.org](http://www.ncci.org) NCCIrregulars Web Site [https://www.facebook.com/groups/NCCIrregulars](https://www.facebook.com/groups/NCCIrregulars) Please read the following before posting in here: [http://preview.tinyurl.com/27zopdy](http://preview.tinyurl.com/27zopdy) ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/suse/original/2X/5/5012ba89e3ffb5220dac47d5ea0ba032e2fe1cb6.png) [@system](https://forums.suse.com/u/system)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 8:21pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/4 "2013-12-10T20:21:51Z")
On Tue, 10 Dec 2013 16:57:03 GMT, “Stevo” [steveSPAM@LESSccgov.net](mailto:steveSPAM@LESSccgov.net) wrote: [color=blue] > So, all you sysadmins. Do you have any suggestions for getting > [L]users to clean up obsolete, duplicated, unnecessary files, or have > you all succumb to just adding more and more storage, increasing backup > times, etc etc to keep the idiot masses happy never having to delete > _ANYTHING_ ?[/color] Our work is project based. When a project is completed, the folder structure for that project is cleaned up and archived. That keeps my storage needs from growing too fast. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/suse/original/2X/5/5012ba89e3ffb5220dac47d5ea0ba032e2fe1cb6.png) [@system](https://forums.suse.com/u/system)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 8:23pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/5 "2013-12-10T20:23:41Z")
On Tue, 10 Dec 2013 16:57:03 GMT, “Stevo” [steveSPAM@LESSccgov.net](mailto:steveSPAM@LESSccgov.net) wrote: [color=blue] > So, all you sysadmins. Do you have any suggestions for getting > [L]users to clean up obsolete, duplicated, unnecessary files, or have > you all succumb to just adding more and more storage, increasing backup > times, etc etc to keep the idiot masses happy never having to delete > _ANYTHING_ ?[/color] You might also want to check into Novell File Reporter or the File Management Suite. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/suse/original/2X/5/5012ba89e3ffb5220dac47d5ea0ba032e2fe1cb6.png) [@system](https://forums.suse.com/u/system)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 8:25pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/6 "2013-12-10T20:25:03Z")
On Tue, 10 Dec 2013 17:37:26 GMT, “Susan” [ncci.mod@gmail.com](mailto:ncci.mod@gmail.com) wrote: [color=blue] > Stevo: > > With storage being so inexpensive, comparatively, to the cost of having > people clean up their files, I’d go for adding storage. :)[/color] Except the only problem is it usually isn’t enough to just add storage. You also have to increase your backup system capacity and speed to deal with the increased storage sizes. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/suse/original/2X/5/5012ba89e3ffb5220dac47d5ea0ba032e2fe1cb6.png) [@system](https://forums.suse.com/u/system)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 8:51pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/7 "2013-12-10T20:51:49Z")
Ken: It depends on what you’re using for backup. Are you just backing up to hard drives or to something else? If hard drives, it still might be less expensive than the cost of personnel time to clean up the files. Depends on the size of the company, the salaries paid, the size of the files. If doing a forced cleanup it might be easier to set up protected directories for them to move critical files to that need to be kept, and then delete all files older than a certain date from the system. After a final backup of them, because you know for certain one of those files will be critical. 🙂 – Susan Novell Community Chat Moderator [http://forums.novell.com/faq.php?faq=novfor#faq\_rules](http://forums.novell.com/faq.php?faq=novfor#faq_rules) [http://www.ncci.org](http://www.ncci.org) NCCIrregulars Web Site [https://www.facebook.com/groups/NCCIrregulars](https://www.facebook.com/groups/NCCIrregulars) Please read the following before posting in here: [http://preview.tinyurl.com/27zopdy](http://preview.tinyurl.com/27zopdy) ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/suse/original/2X/5/5012ba89e3ffb5220dac47d5ea0ba032e2fe1cb6.png) [@system](https://forums.suse.com/u/system)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2013, 11:19pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/8 "2013-12-10T23:19:35Z")
On Tue, 10 Dec 2013 18:51:49 GMT, “Susan” [ncci.mod@gmail.com](mailto:ncci.mod@gmail.com) wrote: [color=blue] > Ken: > > It depends on what you’re using for backup. Are you just backing up to > hard drives or to something else? If hard drives, it still might be > less expensive than the cost of personnel time to clean up the files. > Depends on the size of the company, the salaries paid, the size of the > files. If doing a forced cleanup it might be easier to set up protected > directories for them to move critical files to that need to be kept, > and then delete all files older than a certain date from the system. > After a final backup of them, because you know for certain one of those > files will be critical. :)[/color] Too true! 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/suse/original/2X/5/5012ba89e3ffb5220dac47d5ea0ba032e2fe1cb6.png) [@system](https://forums.suse.com/u/system)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2013, 1:53am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/9 "2013-12-11T01:53:09Z")
Stevo wrote: [color=blue] > So, all you sysadmins. Do you have any suggestions for getting > [L]users to clean up obsolete, duplicated, unnecessary files,[/color] [http://www.novell.com/products/storage-manager/](http://www.novell.com/products/storage-manager/) HTH. – Does this washcloth smell like chloroform? ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/suse/original/2X/5/5012ba89e3ffb5220dac47d5ea0ba032e2fe1cb6.png) [@system](https://forums.suse.com/u/system)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2013, 10:16pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/10 "2013-12-12T22:16:56Z")
> So, all you sysadmins. Do you have any suggestions for getting[color=blue] > [L]users to clean up obsolete, duplicated, unnecessary files, or have > you all succumb to just adding more and more storage, increasing backup > times, etc etc to keep the idiot masses happy never having to delete > _ANYTHING_ ?[/color] Yah I run into that often Steve and at least for the size of our company, ever increasing storage is unsustainable. We would have to invest in some sort of real time duplication to continue further growth. The backups will not fit in even a 12 hour window with two backup servers and the highest end drives I could find. The only other way I could see speeding it up would be to have a maintenance network with a 10GB backbone but pretty sure I’d bump up against other limits elsewhere. Presently we do D2D2T. So, what I do is twice a year is declare a week of house cleaning and make idle threats about purging stuff. Tell people if they have something they aren’t using but want to archive for future use, put it in a folder labeled archive. Most people know what they are using regularly. At the end of spring cleaning the folders labeled ‘archive’ get written to some form of long term storage (usually DVD/Blu-Ray) and the archive folders are purged. Nice thing is if you are using Novell you can normally grab files back using Salvage and never have to go to media. I have the same program in place with eMail. Have I ever gone to DVD to recover something…oh yes. Normally for legal inquiries. Even if you don’t get 100% participation you can normally cleave off a good bit of ‘kruft’. At last purge I reduced our backup window by 2 hours. ---
**Author:** ![buckesfeld](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/c77e96/32.png) [@buckesfeld](https://forums.suse.com/u/buckesfeld)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2013, 6:45pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/11 "2013-12-14T18:45:00Z")
Add storage, _cheap_ storage, and use OES DST to move the garbage off your expensive storage. The amount of dead data is breathtaking. U ---
**Author:** ![lhaig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ec9cab/32.png) [@lhaig](https://forums.suse.com/u/lhaig)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 7:30pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/data-usage/24871/12 "2013-12-16T19:30:20Z")
On 14/12/2013 18:45, Uwe Buckesfeld wrote:[color=blue] > Add storage, _cheap_ storage, and use OES DST to move the garbage off your > expensive storage. The amount of dead data is breathtaking. > > U > [/color] I am with Uwe on this one. Easier to just do that. Lance