Usually, quotas are enforced per user, as related to the proprietary of the file.
Is it possible to apply a quota on a folder basis, in such a way, that a folder contents are limited in disk space?
-
1This can be done on btrfs and zfs with pools. It can't be done with ext4. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Nov 7 '13 at 22:16
Same question asked and answered over here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8148715/how-to-set-limit-on-directory-size-in-linux
basically, make a virtual filesystem by filling a file with zeros to the size you want, then create a filesystem in that file and then loopmount it to the directory you want to limit.
Linux Quartly article about it here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-server-73/directory-quota-601140/
Tutorial here: http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/quota_tutorial.html
-
OK, but this reserves the space form the beginning. It really does not help to save disk space. Does this mean, that there is NO solution to this problem that keeps used disk space minimal ? – Lorenz Meyer Nov 7 '13 at 9:28
-
2@LorenzMeyer: You can limit the use of actually used diskspace by using a sparse-file instead of a full-fledged file. Though you can easy run into trouble when the disk space on the real HDD runs out. E.g.
truncate -s 512M foo;The filesystem (e.g. ext3) is going to make the file less sparse but the ocupied size is still much lower. E.g. a 100MiB sparse file ocupy about 7.7 MiB of space after it has been formatted with ext3. – Runium Nov 7 '13 at 10:07
