October 2, 2003
Managing your computer disk space just got easier
There’s nothing that gets your attention quite so fast as receiving a threat that your e-mail will be shut down.
That’s what’s happened to some people around the University as they came too close to exceeding their allotted disk space. Computing & Communication would issue a “form letter” saying, “Clean out your files or we’re going to cut you off.”
The trouble is, says C&C’s Bob Jamieson, most people have been unaware of disk space quotas and have had no way to know that they were exceeding theirs until they received the warning.
Well, that shouldn’t happen anymore. A C&C team led by Jamieson has created a disk space gauge to quickly tell campus users how much space they’re using and which folders are consuming the most space. The easiest way to use it is to go to your MyUW page and look under e-mail. There you will see a graph that tells you what percentage of your allotted space is being used. To learn more, click “details” and then “view.” You’ll get a list of all your e-mail folders and Web pages and how many megabytes worth of material are in each.
From there it’s a matter of going to the offending folders and deleting unneeded messages. You can then return to the tool and click “update” to find out how much you’ve been able to improve your situation.
Jamieson says the new tool was created in response to requests from users. “People were getting space warnings at the least opportune time,” he says. “They’d be in the middle of a grant application or something, and they’d have to deal with this.”
That happened because e-mail software does not display how much disk space is used by e-mail as a whole, nor does e-mail software display the disk space used by each folder.
So C&C created a team to take on the project. Jamieson had gathered the e-mail from people who had requested a tool, and he shared this with his team members. They then held a focus group with computer support people around campus. Ultimately they built a prototype of the tool and tested it on customers.
Some changes were made based on feedback from users, and the tool went live last week. In addition to the MyUW site (http://myuw.washington.edu/ ), it can be found on the NetID service page (https://uwnetid.washington.edu/manage ) and the WebPine login page (https://webpine.washington.edu ).
In addition to the information about disk space, the tool links to a reference screen titled “Managing your storage space” that provides information on how to prevent and solve problems. C&C has also created a page, http://www.washington.edu/computing/email, that gives general information about e-mail at the University.
This won’t be the end of the project, Jamieson says. The team is exploring some new bells and whistles for the tool — for example, a service people could sign up for that would remind them to check their space allotment periodically or notify them when they were at, say, 85 percent of capacity.
But that’s down the road. In the meantime, C&C hopes the new tool will encourage people to clean out those 3-year-old sent messages about projects long since completed, especially the ones with space-eating attachments. And the team is always interested in feedback. Direct your comments about the disk space gauge to: help@cac.washington.edu.
