Fight Junk Files From Taking Over Your Network

By Darrin Stivala
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data_storageStorage scalability remains one of the more difficult challenges for administrators. As your company grows, so does the number of files and data stored on your network. Given that 40% of files are completely inactive, adding more storage space to account for unused junk files is a waste of money and time. It’s also a risk factor for outages. Wasted storage can quickly get out of control, and your company can wind up paying the price. 

Wasted Time and Money 

Without user quotas, administrators might find one user with a gigabyte of stored space while another may use only a few megabytes. Some users even store their personal, unrelated junk files on the shared network when it is left unlimited and unmonitored.  It’s not uncommon for an administrator to find stored music files, images and even movies on the network.  All of these junk files hold no value to your business. 

Unfortunately, these files become a part of your backups, and take up inordinate amounts of storage space. They also cost the time of administrators who must manage them, since stale junk files duplicate over and over if not controlled. 

When this happens, most administrators will budget for more storage capacity, which essentially wastes company money and the time needed to deploy new resources. 

Increased Outage Risks 

Exhausted storage resources can also lead to the increased risk of an outage. When this occurs, users can’t store files, applications don’t function properly, and critical network performance is reduced. Administrators must be able to stabilize the environment to avoid critical downtime. This means that inactive files not only waste time and money, but they also increase your outage risk. 

Solution: Better File Management 

One solution to these challenges is to deploy user quotas. With good file management, you can give administrators cost recovery, better control over what is being saved, and how it is being saved.  

DefendX Software QFS is a solution that gives you the power to optimize your storage capacity and manage the amount of space users can have on any given device. For instance, 400 TB of storage fills up quickly when you have several thousand users filling it up with junk files. Limiting the amount of storage per user or department will force users to purge unnecessary files when their quota is approaching. Essentially, you educate users about their personal storage consumption. 

QFS gives you the option of hard or soft quota policies. Hard policies stop users from storing anything over their given storage limit. Soft quota policies allow the user to go over their quota, but an email is sent to let the user know he or she has gone over the limit. This allows the administrator to provide quota limits and regulations for different organizations based on their storage requirements in real time. 

Once you make users aware of storage consumption, you can avoid wasted disk space that ultimately cripples your network with poor cost efficiency and risk. With NTP Software QFS, you can eliminate much of the overhead by: 

Want to fight back against the junk files taking over your network?  Explore the Six Easy Steps to Control Data Storage Growth!

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Topics: Quotas, Storage, junk files

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