[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>Now, enough for the facts; let us get on to the opinions. :-)
>
>~/OldFiles: JUST SAY NO
I used to be a consultant for several thousand AFS users at Carnegie
Mellon's Andrew cell. I remember many users asking how to remove the
contents of ~/OldFiles to free up space in their volumes. I
understood the confusion, because when I was first exposed to AFS, I
asked the same question!
So should you get rid of the OldFiles mount point for your new users?
It would certainly reduce the questions concerning the mysterious
OldFiles directory, but I think it would be a *huge* disservice to
your user community in the long run.
As a novice user, it didn't take long for me to understand that my
OldFiles directory was a different, read-only volume with a separate
quota. For the short time I was confused it didn't cause me any harm.
In fact, I figured out on my own that I could get to an old copy of my
home directory using OldFiles. As a consultant, it was easy for me to
explain the situation to others by pointing them to a locally
developed help document.
I believe that the OldFiles mount point is used more often than some
administrators realize. Someone recently suggested that you not
create the mount point until the users first approach you for a
restoral. Many users who accidentally destroy their work would be
more inclined to re-enter the lost data than ask a consultant for
help. That's just one of the quirks of human nature. No matter how
many consultants are available nearby, many people would rather take
care of the problem themselves than explain the whole story to someone
else.
If I were an AFS administrator, I would mount the backup volume for
all my users in a prominent location that they would be likely to
stumble across on their own. That is, I wouldn't use a dot file to
hide it away from the novice users are most likely to zap themselves.
I agree that the name "OldFiles" might not be the best. RPI's choice
of "yesterday" seems more intuitive, though it implies that you do vos
backups every day. The point is to make it obvious that this
directory is the place to look when your "rm junk *" command goes
awry. If it's obvious enough, all those users who ignore the
documentation, posters, and newspaper ads will still get the idea that
backups are immediately available -- even for the small mistakes.
The case of the person removing all the files from the RW volume
because copies were available in OldFiles is rather shocking, but in
my AFS consulting experience, quite rare. Before you abandon the
OldFiles concept, consider the time saved when your users perform
mini-restores themselves instead of reproducing the work or asking a
consultant for help. In my opinion, the convenience and utility of
general access to on-line backups is more than worth the questions
and confusion they can lead to.
Joe Jackson,
AFS Product Support,
Transarc Corp.
