Disk space notification notifies when a partition is full which is mounted as a subdirectory of /home

[Lakin Wecker]

I have a partition which is mounted as /home/data and is world readable/writable. It's frequently close to being full, with only a few hundred megabytes of storage free, because I store some large data sets there for processing. My actual home directory is /home/lakin and has 12G available ...
Relavent lines from df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda9 19G 5.8G 12G 34% /
/dev/hda5 51G 48G 419M 100% /home/data

However, I get a notification everytime I login telling me:
"Low Disk Space

99% of the disk space on /home (/home/data) is in use"

This data directory is not used as a home partition for any user, and thereby it being full has no adverse affects on running my gnome desktop. Shouldn't the gnome-volume-manager do some basic checking to ensure that the partition isn't critical to the function of the computer before showing this warning message?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Sub-directory of /home is a rather special case, but I have no problems with adding that.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

What's your proposal to define that in a sensible way? We specifically want to warn the user if his own home is about to overflow.

[Lakin Wecker (lakin)]

I guess that this is meant to warn people because applications will stop working with no warning when their home directory is full, correct?

In this case, /home/data is not the home directory of any user on the system. So it being full does not affect any user.

My suggestion is to do a lookup between the home directories of all users on the system and see if the directory which is full is indeed going to cause problems.

[Jean-Philippe (skateinmars)]

This is way too complicated.
The normal use for /home is to store user's peronal directory and informations. Using /home for data or ftp's space is not the "conventional" way.

I think we should keep the warning for /home and simply let each user choose to remove this warning or not (an advanced option could be to specify a special non/user directory)

[Lakin Wecker (lakin)]

This is not ftp space, nor is it data for a service. This is personal data that I need to have available in both windows and linux. If we use your suggestion, then there is no way I can get a meaningful warning. Either it's on, and I get the warning everytime I log in. Or it's off, and my real home directory can get full without warning.

I guess I could go back through the process of mounting this directory somewhere else, but I don't see the point. Ideally, this warning should only warn when there _is_ a problem. Having generic warnings that _might_ be right is very annoying to the average user.

Currently the warning is useless for me because it is overzealous at reporting problems.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

I agree that this is way too complicated. Starting to 'guess' the usage of a file system will only lead to more bugs, I think. So I rather favor the idea of providing a simple method of disabling the notification for a particular volume, which is bug 33967.

It's just a suggestion though, so if you heavily disagree, please feel free to reopen and remove the duplicate. Thank you!

[Lakin Wecker (lakin)]

Eep. I misread the original poster's idea for removing the warning. I thought they were suggesting a sweep-all option that either turns on warnings or turns them off. Having a black-list of partitions to ignore would suit me fine. :)