why the quotafile so large?

[Dong Hui]

Hi friends. The quotafiles at / looks so large that they can't be backuped by veritas.
#ls -al
-rw-r--r-- 1 root operator 274877849600 Sep 16 16:43 quota.group
-rw-r----- 1 root operator 274877849600 Sep 16 16:49 quota.user

thanks for any suggestions.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

You don't really think you have an 274 Tera-byte quota file do you now? How big is the disk? :-).

The file is sparse (it has holes in it) try: ls -ls quota.user

The 1st column of the display will show the number of 1K blocks allocated to the file.

Or try: du -k quota.user

The UID is used as and index into the file. What is the highest UID with files on that filesystem?

Anyway... please verify you backup command. -- These files should not be backed up as regular files.
- Maybe Veritas shoudl knwo about sparse files?

Be sure to contact Veritas for further support if needed.

hth,
Hein.

[Ralf Puchner]

a quick explanation of sparse files:

The "ls -sl" command can be used to determine whether a file is sparseor not. The "s" parameter displays physical disk
usage in 1024 byte units. A zero filled file will display a number that when multipled by 1024 is very close to the
allocated size displayed. The sparse file will display a disk usage number significantly smaller.

Examples:
#ls -ls !Zero filled file
1032 -rw-r--r-- 1 .. .. 1048582 Nov 14 09:23 sparse_file
(1032 * 1024) = 1056768 bytes

#ls -ls !sparse file
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 .. .. 1048582 Nov 14 09:23 sparse_file
(8 * 1024) = 8192 bytes

vdump/vrestore will handle the quota files correctly, in case of veritas you must exclude this files and regenerate it in case of emergency (restore of filesystem).

[Dong Hui]

Thank Heuvel and Ralf Puchner:
Yes,I excluded these files from veritas backup policy and known that it won't affect the system. I notice the "size" of two files changed at SEP 16th. Before that day system and veritas looks well. I want to known why the attribute make change automaticly. I didn't add user recently. The latest UID is 236 and the grestest UID is 65536 for "nobody".

regards

[Ralf Puchner]

you can use the quotacheck command (don't forget to modify /etc/fstab as described within the man-page) to verify the consistency.