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Storage costs are decreasing, leading many users and even some administrators to believe it is cheap and virtually limitless. However, proper storage management remains critical, and Linux quotas offer a solution to effectively govern how storage is utilized.
Efficient storage management doesn’t just impact costs associated with buying additional disks or cloud storage; it also influences:
It’s essential to keep some free space available on system disks for the operating system’s regular activities, such as file creation, logging, and updates.
Linux administrators can utilize storage quotas to regulate how users consume storage space. There are two types of quotas you can implement: soft quotas, which allow users to exceed limits temporarily, and hard quotas, which strictly enforce limits.
When establishing these quotas, it's crucial to gather data using soft quotas first, enabling you to assess user behavior over time without immediate restrictions. Once you have insights, you can set hard quotas accordingly.
A reasonable timeline for implementing quotas includes:
Linux enforces quotas on a per-file system basis, meaning you can manage user and group storage limitations for each activated file system. Group quotas consider the total storage consumed by all group members, further refining storage management. Effective planning is necessary to ensure the proper application of quotas across critical directories like /home
and /var/log
.