[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
>
>Now, enough for the facts; let us get on to the opinions. :-)
>
>~/OldFiles: JUST SAY NO
>
>I happen to work for the user consulting group here, and volunteer for
>another group which does user consulting as part of it's operation.
>In spite of a huge advertising campaing, which included posters all
>over the place, a global motd, a message on every single public
>workstation's idle display, adds in the local papers, etc., people
>were still most confused about the backup volume. Users didn't
>understand why they couldn't remove it, or modify files in it. They
>thought it counted against their quotas. They wanted to know why `du'
>was giving them output that was different from `quota -v' (we didn't
>install an afs-mountpoint-aware du here). My favorite was the user
>who didn't want to be using that much extra disk space, so he *deleted
>all of his files*, since they were already copied in ~/OldFiles!!!
>
As a user, I like having the backup file available, but at RPI it's
called "yesterday", as Jim Ault just mentioned on this list. Maybe the
name "yesterday" reduces the amount of confusion slightly. I think the
education program was good at RPI, but I'm not a consultant, so I am
not aware of how much confusion resulted. Lots of people had questions
but as far as I know they were able to obtain answers quickly because
there are many ways to get more information about the computing
environment at RPI.
In a paper from Carnegie Mellon, the designers point out that their
reason for the backup volume is to make yesterday's work immediately
available to the users, and to make it possible to recover that work
without assistance from the operations staff.
So you spend some money up front on hardware and education, and you
save long term on restore man hours and you get more user satisfaction
because they lose fewer files.
Brian
--
My humble opinion. Just a user.
