I can see one DISadvantage of soft quotas. When a user passes the soft quota he sees at most one diagnostic message at that moment and may see nothing at all. If login is configured, the user gets his disk quota status at login, but many users ignore login messages. If the hard limit is much larger than the soft limit, the user may consume quite a bit more disk during his one week grace period (but still stay below the hard limit). When the grace period runs out, the system does not let him have a single disk block until he deletes enough files to get back under his SOFT limit. Our help desk staff (who do not have superuser and cannot increase quotas) occasionally have to deal with very confused and frustrated users who fall into this trap, even though we send out automatic email warnings to users who are over their soft limit.
"I couldn't save this file I was editing, so I freed up more than enough disk space and it still won't let me save. What's that? You're kidding. I have to delete 50 more Mbytes before I can save this file?"
We have some crafty users who routinely stay above their soft limit. When their grace period runs out, they simply copy all their stuff to /tmp, clean out their home directory to reset the clock, and copy everything back. They're good for another week.
Snapshots would make this trick even easier -- no copying to /tmp needed. Just clean out your directory and copy everything back from the latest snapshot.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure that if NetApp were to support soft quotas, we would use them. But we can live without the soft quotas. We'll send out automatic email warnings to users close to their limit.
Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 804-924-0640
University of Virginia ITC Unix Support