CMS Tier-3 News Item

snaphot taking of /shome now only on daily basis

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Dear Users

Since the too frequent taking of snapshots has led time and time again to problems with users not being able to free up their home space, I decided to drop for the moment the hourly taking of snapshots. A snapshot of your filesystem will henceforth be taken once per day some time after 1 o'clock in the morning.

This gives you a longer reaction time to catch problems due to jobs overfilling the file system. In the present system, each hour the whole system was snapshotted, and so in the optimal case you were only able to free up the space consumed during the last 59 minutes (but often less). Now, this time in enlarged to one day.

The cost of this measure is that you no longer have an hourly "backup", but only a daily one. But hourly backups are extremely unusual, and I doubt that their benefit exceeds the damage that they caused. If we find a nice way how you yourself could remove snapshots, we could reintroduce a more frequent snapshot taking, but for the moment I think that you are better served by the daily interval.

If you strongly disagree, please write to this list.

Best regards,

Derek

DerekFeichtinger 26. 02. 2017