DA backup system for user level.

[Chrysalis]

Currently a user backing up his own data has to have sufficient free hd quota for it to be successful here is what I posted in another thread.

Having thought about this it is very unfair to the user to expect them to only use half of their space so they can run the backup tool, I think the backup file should be owned by diradmin and the amount of backups a user can have sitting on the server at once settable by the admin so if its eg. 2 then the user can have 2 seperate backups at any time which wouldnt affect their hd quota.

An alternative is to use soft quotas on top of hard quotas allowing them to go over the limit for a grace period which should allow backups to work.

Any thoughts on this?

 

[nobaloney]

You make some good points.

This problem is only one of the reasons we don't implement system quotas at all, nor do we run automatic suspension based on quota. We believe human intervention is a good idea .

What would you recommend? How about setting the soft quota at what you want the user to stay under and setting the hard quota at twice the soft quota?

I'm not sure of the issues involved; do you have experience in using soft and hard quotas this way?

Jeff

 

[Chrysalis]

I have enough experience as to how it works at the shell level yes.

The hardquota is what DA currently uses, here is output for a user's quota on a server.

Disk quotas for user XXXX (uid 10XX):
Filesystem usage quota limit grace files quota limit grace
/usr 32026 2048000 2048000 1496 0 0


and a quote taken from man edquota

Users are permitted to exceed their soft limits for a grace period that may be specified per file system. Once the grace period has expired, the soft limit is enforced as a hard limit.

So I think your idea of a hard limit double the size of a soft limit is good, a grace period of say 12 hours is reasonable. However there is complications if the user was to leave the backup in place they would then be over the limit, so perhaps DA would need to auto delete the backup when the grace period expires.