5.7. Storage Management Day-to-Day

This is one area in which a system administrator needs to summon all the diplomacy and social skills they can muster. Quite often discussions over disk space become emotional, as people view enforcement of disk usage restrictions as making their job more difficult (or impossible), that the restrictions are unreasonably small, or that they just do not have the time to clean up their files.

The best system administrators take many factors into account in such a situation. Are the restrictions equitable and reasonable for the type of work being done by this person? Does the person seem to be using their disk space appropriately? Can you help the person reduce their disk usage in some way (by creating a backup CD-ROM of all emails over one year old, for example)? Your job during the conversation is to attempt to discover if this is, in fact, the case while making sure that someone that has no real need for that much storage cleans up their act.

In any case, the thing to do is to keep the conversation on a professional, factual level. Try to address the user's issues in a polite manner ("I understand you are very busy, but everyone else in your department has the same responsibility to not waste storage, and their average utilization is less than half of yours.") while moving the conversation toward the matter at hand. Be sure to offer assistance if a lack of knowledge/experience seems to be the problem.

Approaching the situation in a sensitive but firm manner is often better than using your authority as system administrator to force a certain outcome. For example, you might find that sometimes a compromise between you and the user is necessary. This compromise can take one of three forms:

You might find that the user can reduce their usage if they have some amount of temporary space that they can use without restriction. People that often take advantage of this situation find that it allows them to work without worrying about space until they get to a logical stopping point, at which time they can perform some housekeeping, and determine what files in temporary storage are really needed or not.

Other times, the user may have many files that are so obviously old that it is unlikely continuous access to them is needed. Make sure you determine that this is, in fact, the case. Sometimes individual users are responsible for maintaining an archive of old data; in these instances, you should make a point of assisting them in that task by providing multiple backups that are treated no differently from your data center's archival backups.

However, there are times when the data is of dubious value. In these instances you might find it best to offer to make a special backup for them. You then back up the old data, and give the user the backup media, explaining that they are responsible for its safekeeping, and if they ever need access to any of the data, to ask you (or your organization's operations staff -- whatever is appropriate for your organization) to restore it.

There are a few things to keep in mind so that this does not backfire on you. First and foremost is to not include files that are likely to need restoring; do not select files that are too new. Next, make sure that you are able to perform a restoration if one ever is requested. This means that the backup media should be of a type that you are reasonably sure will be used in your data center for the foreseeable future.