OAL Temp Drive Practices
Under the former set of rules for the Open Access Labs temp drive share, the only thing examined on it was the root directory that a user created. If that directory's modified date was older than 30 days, it was removed. Unfortunately this did not take in to account subdirectories that had files in them that had been modified within those 30 days. In order to remedy this problem, the guidelines by which the Open Access Labs temp drive share is managed by have been changed to the following:
The Open Access Labs temp drive share is truly a temporary storage area. It should NOT be used for storage of mission critical, non-reproducible data or as a backup storage medium for any other system. Everything and anything on the share can be removed at any given time without warning. There is no backup maintained or planned for this share. Only academic related materials are to be stored on this share.
The files on the Open Access Labs temp drive share are put on a seven(7) day cycle. Each individual file is checked and after seven(7) days of inactivity, it is removed from the share. The temp drive share was never meant as a location to install and launch programs from. The way the guidelines are enforced, most executables(and some other files) will be removed within a twenty-four(24) hour period of being 'installed' onto the temp drive share. However, any programs that you create yourself, document files of any type that you edit frequently and other files that you have created and modify with some frequency within the seven(7) day guideline limit should be safe from removal. However, there is NO GUARANTEE. What you put there this minute may be gone the next minute.
Space consumption is monitored on a 'per user' basis. (In other words, even if you make thirty(30) directories with one(1) megabyte of data in each one, it is seen as your user ID taking up 30 megabytes of space.) Users are allowed a reasonable amount of space on the temp drive. Reasonable is defined, in this case, as 100MB of consumed space. Anything over this amount will be considered an infringement of these practices.
Also, the rule has always been that there is to be only one(1) file in the root of the Open Access Labs temp drive share. That file is the "!!Temp_Drive_Practices!!.txt" file. All other files found in the root of the share (in other words, not in a subdirectory) will be removed as soon as they are found. There will be NO date analysis on files before removing them.
Lastly, anyone found abusing their temp drive share privileges shall have those privileges removed, meaning they will not be able to access the temp drive share in any way. The duration for this revocation shall be decided on a case by case basis.
The short version of all of this:
- The temp drive share(M:) is for academic use only.
- Files will be removed after seven(7) days.
- There is NO backup for this share.
- Users are allowed a reasonable amount of space(100MB).
- Do not put any files in the root, make subdirectories.
- Do not install programs on the temp drive share(M:).
- Do not abuse your privileges to this resource. Your access to it can be denied.