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Running on empty: fishy files drying up storage space by George Spain IS Technical Publisher Anybody who has rented there knows downtown storage space is tight and costly. Nowhere is this more true, however, than on MUSC’s campuswide computer network. The technical team charged with preserving, protecting, and defending the limited common file storage space for more than 9,000 computer users fights a daily battle of the bloat trying to monitor this space for inappropriate or excessive large files. The MUSC SAN (Storage Area Network) provides roughly 1.5 terabytes of file space for the whole campus. That’s about 1,500 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s a lot, isn’t it? Not really. This SAN acts as if it were a hard drive attached to each user’s computer. It can be called “I:Drive,” “H:Drive, “FinLAN storage,” etc. The point is that this space in not on your personal computer, but on a communal group of drives.  According to Duane Deweese, team leader for Storage and Backup in the Data Center, this drive should be used for storing business-related files and applications. All files stored on the I: Drive are backed up to prevent data loss. Since there is no official quota policy in place (that may change soon), technically any user can store any amount of any size files on the I: Drive.  This allows for some very bad practices. Consider this: 18 gigabytes of foreign movies were removed from one offender’s disk space. Pornography, both movies and stills, have been found in the files reserved for business matters. A storage team member had to come in for four hours on Christmas day to delete millions of bytes of Christmas songs from users’ directories to restore space on the SAN. Around April when new populations arrive on campus, MP3 music files often pop up like spring flowers. These files take up much more room than text documents and, whether or not the files were obtained legitimately, most violate the MUSC Computer Use Policy (http://www.musc.edu/infoservices/cup.html).  During Christmas, staff members removed hundreds of instances of a special flash file called Elf Bowling, a game in which Santa tries to knock over wisecracking elves. Fred Nash, a Storage/Backup staff member who removed them said, “it’s a cute game and it isn’t terribly big, but when there are hundreds and hundreds of them, you can watch the free space sap away.” Late summer provides another seasonal problem: hurricanes. “People start backing up everything to the I: Drive. Personal files, operating systems, saved e-mail attachments, everything. Not only is this unnecessary, but it won’t work,” Nash said. He said that files copied this way couldn’t be restored in any meaningful way. Some 60 percent of the files stored on the I: Drive haven’t been touched for more than a year. About 21 percent haven’t been opened for more than five years. While the storage team is looking for more storage space, it's a long way off and isn’t the solution anyway. “‘There just isn’t that much space now. The SAN that acts as the storage for about 9,000 users is at 85 percent capacity, and for the past six months has been in a ‘crisis state’,” said Deweese. Deweese, Nash, and Jeff Felesky, who are charged with keeping the SAN operational, have their hands full.  “We don’t want to be the file cops,” said Nash. “But we’ve got to find a way to get through to people that there isn’t infinite storage space. “ What you can do: Don’t download non-business related MP3, jpeg, mov, or other types of music, movies, pictures, etc., files to the I: Drive. Go through your directory (your personal space on the SAN) and remove files that are not business related or are out of date. Keep your iTunes applications off of your work computer. Don’t save common applications that are already available through LYNX on the I: Drive. Items such as Acrobat Reader, WinZip, etc. (For a list of items you should delete from your I: Drive, see * below). If you don’t do these things, remember: Administrators can tell who downloaded what type of file and when. While a graphic, movie, or exe file may not be gigantic, multiply the instance by a few thousand and you have large storage problem. If songs or jpegs violate copyright laws, MUSC could be held liable and heavily fined for retaining them. Even those songs that are legal and the photos of family members that don’t violate any laws, do violate MUSC’s Computer Use Policy and can result in administrative action against you. Servers running at more than 90 percent capacity can cause file corruption and drive failure not just to the one who has stored large files, but to the up to 2,000 other users on that server segment. * Additional items you should delete from your I: Drive: Firefox, Spinner, Webshots, AIMInstall (AOL Instant Messenger), MusicMatch, iTunesSetup, Flashplayer, Citrix Client, PalmDesktop Software, QuickTime, Netscape, RealPlayer, PCAnywhere, any and all games.   Friday, Feb. 11, 2005 Catalyst Online is published weekly, updated as needed and improved from time to time by the MUSC Office of Public Relations for the faculty, employees and students of the Medical University of South Carolina. Catalyst Online editor, Kim Draughn, can be reached at 792-4107 or by email, catalyst@musc.edu. Editorial copy can be submitted to Catalyst Online and to The Catalyst in print by fax, 792-6723, or by email to petersnd@musc.edu or catalyst@musc.edu. 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