Drive Space Warnings

A part-time-would-be-marketer’s weekend:

Cam home from work on Friday & opened my email. Email from my ‘niche’ webhost – Drive Space Warning: account has filled its allocated space. – Huh? There’s supposed to be room for 5 domains, & I have only two, with a total of less than 300 pages, plus a couple of blogs. What’s taking up all the space? After some detective work, I discovered that the log files for one of the statistics programs, Analog stats, were taking up two thirds of the space. Deleted the log files, and now I have room for three more domains. Will have to ask support to remove that particular stats program, as I don’t use it anyway.

Saturday, when I get to my computer, theres a big alert saying The Backup Drive Is Full. What? Its 50% larger than the drive that it mirrors. I do some detective work and notice that, because the software can only be set to mirror a whole drive, it is copying the recycle bin on that drive, which seems to have grown to gargantuan proportions. I reduce the size of the recycle bin to the minimum, delete the overgrown recyle-bin-mirror, and there’s room on the backup drive again – for a while at least. I know I need to start moving some of my graphics off my main hard drive, or that will be full as well.

Sunday, and an email from my VPS webhost – Drive Space Warning! I read up a bit on VPS optimization and realize that the default configuration has three statistics programs and three mail programs when I really only need one of each. So I change the settings, and then manually delete the logs from nearly thirty existing domains. Now there’s a bit of free space on that drive again, for a while.

The whole weekend experience feels like a metaphor for my life: Drive Space Warning! Your life is full!