Running Out of Space on a Server

One of the most disastrous mistakes to make on a network server is to let it run out of disk space. When you buy a new server with hundreds of gigabytes of disk space, you might think you'll never run out of space. But it's amazing how quickly an entire network full of users can run through a few hundred gigabytes of disk space.

Unfortunately, bad things begin to happen when you get down to a few gigabytes of free space on a server. Windows begins to perform poorly and may even slow to a crawl. Errors start popping up. And, when you finally run out of space completely, users line up at your door demanding an immediate fix:

• The best way to avoid this unhappy situation is to monitor the free disk space on your servers on a daily basis. It's also a good idea to keep track of free disk space on a weekly basis so you can look for project trends. For example, if your file server has 100GB of free space and your users chew up about 5GB of space per week, you know you'll most likely run out of disk space in 20 weeks. With that knowledge in hand, you can formulate a plan.

• Adding additional disk storage to your servers isn't always the best solution to the problem of running out of disk space. Before you buy more disks, you should

  • Look for old and unnecessary files that can be removed.

  • Consider using disk quotas to limit the amount of network disk space your users can consume.