Disk usage ... an update ...

SNF Lab Members:

Some of you have sent me email stating: Person X is gone ...

While I appreciate your willingness to help, we try to be somewhat
systematic about removing lab members.

Here is what we do (and we do this annually):

If someone shows no Coral activity (equipment use, reservations,
inventory check outs, subscriptions, etc) for the last 3 years truncated
to the start of the year (that is 01-JAN-2009), we then dump all of
their files to tertiary storage, deactivate them, remove them from
things like mailing lists, etc. I am doing this housekeeping (with a
series of scripts) as I type this. It takes a number of hours to
complete ...

You might think that 3 years is too long a period to wait, but you'd be
surprised by the number of folks that come back either working for a
company, as a faculty member or post-doc at another institution, even
after they have "left".

In any event, this is a more convenient way of "cleaning up" in bulk and
gives us fewer places to look for old records if/when someone shows back
up after more than 3 years looking for something.

Some of you have also written to say "I don't keep any files" on the
Coral computers. If you don't, but you still show up on the over-100MB
list, that usually means that you have a big Firefox (or Mozilla) cache
or have downloaded things like videos. For example, some of you likely
have local stored copies of various SNF training videos (say,
delrin_tweezers.wmv, sgv.wmv, etc). Since those files are always
available at our web site, you don't need a local copy and deleting
those local copies of Windows Media Viewer files helps everyone.

Thanks for you continued support,

John