Why are my file servers not releasing their hard drive space when I delete files

October 16, 2008 11:29 AM

Why are my file servers not releasing their hard drive space when I delete files

I have 3 file servers each running window xp on a network. These are serving educational videos to 21 students. I've discovered that I'm having sharing problems because more then 10 students are accessing each machine at a time which isn't allowed in xp. So I need to rearrange where the files are located on each shared volume so that only 8 users are connected to a file server at a time.

I'm logged into these machines from my macbook pro. I've been moving files around and deleting them from each file server. But I've discovered that though I delete the files, the hard drive space remains the same. I've deleted tons from one machine, and yet it keeps showing on 7gigs available. What gives? I've tried emptying the trash directly on the machines themselves, but still, the space available is 7gigs. I've also tried deleting these files from one of the windows machines. Same result.

Thanks for any help.

posted by jeffreyclong to computers & internet (5 comments total)

It depends a lot on how you're doing the deletion. If they're in the trashcan, they aren't really deleted, and the space they occupy isn't included in the calculation of drive free space.
posted by Class Goat at 12:10 PM on October 16, 2008

First off, dont delete them with a mac. OS X uses a reverse engineered SMB implementation called samba which always seems to be a few versions behind the current one, which is buggy in itself. use a windows machine or use VNC or something to connect to the XP box and delete it directly.

I dont remember how OS X treats SMB shares but it may be putting these items in your recycling bin. You may need to delete it from there.

Now log into the XP box and see if the recycler on there needs to be emptied. Most likely there is a hidden folder in XP called Recycler either in the root of the folder you are deleting from or on C:\ Its safe to delete. Sometimes the recycle bin gets confused or samba breaks it.
posted by damn dirty ape at 12:27 PM on October 16, 2008

Is there any reason why you can't slap, say, SuSE Linux 11 on a spare box, and serve them from there, where there won't be any concepts as silly as "Client Access Licenses" to deal with?
posted by baylink at 12:28 PM on October 16, 2008

More info here.
posted by damn dirty ape at 12:31 PM on October 16, 2008

Yes. I agree that suse or ubuntu would be the better solution. Unfortunately that's not a decision I can make at this point. I discovered the problem. Turns out the drive on the Windows xp machines are partitioned. The way I was browsing, it was only showing the space available on the C: drive of each machine. So I just need to browse into the volumes differently.

Thanks all
posted by jeffreyclong at 12:33 PM on October 16, 2008