Care of your M drive

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Looking After Your M Drive

ISS provides all users with some centralised disk space, usually 300 megabytes. This is, of course, miniscule compared to the disks on a modern home PC or laptop, and we would like to provide more. But the costs of providing, maintaining, and backing-up a larger amount, for all our 11000 users, would be prohibitive.

To check your current quota, see the webpage https://www2.essex.ac.uk/secure/cs/quotas/diskquota.asp.

Once you reach your disk quota, you cannot write or extend files until you have freed some space. The consequences of this can be unpleasant, particularly if you have Outlook Personal Folders on your M: drive. This webpage gives some guidance on keeping your M drive in order.

Classify your files

You should regularly review the files on your M drive, to see if you still need them, and if so when. I use three categories:-

Files I am currently working with.
Those I may need in the future, but not now.
Those I no longer need at all.

Only the first category is clearly suitable for the M drive. Anything in the third should be deleted. The second category is more debateable: you must balance the convenience of having them there when you need them and the inconvenience of their reducing your free disk space. As you get closer to your disk quota, the option of moving these files to some other storage, such as CD or USB memory stick, should be considered.

Deal with big files

It is better use of your time to remove one big file from your M: drive than the equivalent size in small ones. You can use the Search facility of My Computer to locate big files. The procedure is slightly different in different Operating Systems. To find files bigger than 5 megabytes under Windows 2000, for example:-

Right-click My Computer and select Search
Set the Look In box to your M: drive
Click in the Size box. More options will pop up.
Set the conditions to at least 5000 KB
Click the Search Now button

The results window looks like this
2000
Note that I have only one file larger than 5 megabytes, my Outlook Personal Folders.

However, to find files bigger than 5 megabytes under Windows XP professional:-

Right-click My Computer and select Search
Select All files and folders
Set the Look In box to your M: drive
Click on the chevrons by What size is it? More options will pop up.
Click on Specify, set the conditions to at least 5000 KB
Click the Search button

The results window looks like this
2000
Note that I now have three files larger than 5 megabytes!

This apparent contradiction is explained by noting that the two "extra" large files are both in the folder M:hp.zip, which is not a sub-folder, but a ZIP file. The ZIP has a filesize below 5 megabytes (in fact 1.3 megabytes), but its contents include two files that were over 5 megabytes before being compressed into the ZIP file. The Search facility of Windows XP looks inside ZIPs, whereas that of Windows 2000 does not.

Conclusion: Zipping large files saves space

Take care with Outlook Personal Folders

You should take particular care if you have your Outlook Personal Folders on your M drive. If your exceed your disk quota while putting email into your Personal Folders, the Personal Folders file will be corrupted, making it unreadable. It may be possible to fix the corruption by using the Inbox Repair Tool, but if not it will be necessary to restore an uncorrupt copy off backup tapes. This will lose all email written since the backup was taken.

It is, therefore, good practice not to Move items into your Personal Folders, but to Copy them, and only delete them from the original source once they have been safely moved. It is bad practice to keep both copies.

Remove unwanted messages from your Outlook Personal Folders

In order to prevent your Personal Folders file growing, it is necessary to remove unwanted messages from time to time. Two points should be noted.

Deleting an item from your Personal Folders merely moves in into the Deleted Items sub-folder of your Personal Folders, thus not saving you any space. To free space, the message must be deleted from the Deleted Items folder. Note that the Empty Deleted Items Tool does not touch the contents of Personal Folders: it is necessary to go to the folder and delete the item.
Removing items from the Deleted Items sub-folder of your Personal Folders does not reduce the size of the file on disk. Outlook maintains the Personal Folders file as a database: deleting an entry creates a "hole" which Outlook will use if possible when writing another message, so the file will not grow unless it is full, but Outlook will not shrink the file unless told to Compact it..

To Compact your Personal Folder file (or Archived Email file), right-click on it in the Folder list. A small window will pop up. On earlier versions of Outlook, this will have a Compact Now button. Later versions will not, but will have an Advanced... button, which when clicked will bring up a further small window, which will have the Compact Now Button.

Click the Compact Now Button. A notification window will show that compaction is taking place, which will disappear when the task is complete. Your Personal Folders file will now be the minimum size possible.

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