On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 11:17 +0100, Shabana Zia wrote:
> Hi Dan,
>
> Yes, basically we found that there was no more space available on the
> hard drive. Tutors are uploading documents which have huge file
> sizes and many are uploading material that is not particularly
> relevant - this therefore is taking up space on the hard drive.
We had the identical problem some months ago. The worst-case files
were just under 800Mb each: one an MPG, the other four PPT files inside
a DOC file. But large numbers of PPT and DOC files abounded.
Deleting stuff from the recyclebin got us enougn space to manoeuvre
for a while, so we made it a nightly procedure to delete anything
from the recyclebin over 8Mb or over a week old:
find /usr/local/blackboard/content/vi/bb_bb60/recyclebin/ \
-type f -mtime +7 -exec mv -f {} /tmp \; -ls |tee /tmp/recycled-old
find /usr/local/blackboard/content/vi/bb_bb60/recyclebin/ \
-type f -size +8192k -exec mv -f {} /tmp \; -ls |
tee /tmp/recycled-big
We also cycled the log files nightly and zipped them up onto another
spindle. That got us off the hook for long enough to source a bigger
machine.
I mailed all tutors and asked them nicely to make sure uploaded files
were not too big. The reactions varied: everyone understood the need
but only a few knew how to find out the size of a file, so we had some
documentation to do. Most were very co-operative and immediately combed
their courses for big outdated files and removed them; others turned
them into PDFs using OpenOffice or LaTeX. One or two (including the
owners of the files mentioned earlier) did nothing, so I just deleted
the files.
PPT and DOC (especially one inside the other) are among the most
profligate file structures around (someone from Microsoft once
admitted that "Word files are largely air"). One of our sister
colleges now bans both types from their Bb system, and only allows
PDF and a few others.
///Peter
