File-system Litter
George V. Neville-Neil · Queue · 2011
Dear KV, We recently ran out of storage space on a very large file server and upon closer inspection we found that it was just one employee who had used it all up. The space was taken up almost exclusively by small files that were the result of running some data-analysis scripts. These files were completely unnecessary after they had been read once. The code that generated the files had no good way of cleaning them up once they had been created; it just went on believing that storage was infinite. Now we’ve had to put quotas on our file servers and, of course, deal with weekly cries for more disk space. Surely there is a better way of dealing with this problem than clamping down on everyone for fear that one of them will do the wrong thing.