HUGE quota.user file

[Gordon Morrison]

We have a TRU64 V4.0 server where the quota.user file is ridiculously huge on both the root and /usr filessytems:
-rw-r----- 1 root operator 137438953472 Jan 26 16:23 quota.user
/usr is only half a gig & root is even smaller, and they both have plenty free space, so I'm thinking the file must be corrupted. We don't use quotas, but I gather you can't just blatt this file with > quota.user and quotaoff / quotacheck don't have any effect.
The main problem is that the backups are taking forever. I could exclude the file from backups, but I'm worried about filesystem integrity.
Is there any way to fix the size of quota.user?

[Victor Semaska_3]

They're not as large as they appear. This has been discussed in another thread.

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=916202

Sounds like you have a different problem regarding slow backups.

[Martin Moore]

This is not a problem. The quota files are sparse files, i.e., they have "holes" of empty space that don't actually take up any disk space. If you do an ls -ls on the file, the first field is the ACTUAL disk space used in KB. You'll see that the file really occupies much less disk space than the length field would suggest. This is because the quota files are indexed based on the UID (for quota.user) or GID (for quota.group). If you have very large UIDs or GIDs (or negative ones, which translate to very very large unsigned integers) it will make the files appear very large.

You can't change this, short of removing the large UIDs/GIDs and changing ownership of any files belonging to them, and you can't remove the quota files. But it's really not a problem. The Tru64 backup utilities, and most third-party ones as well, handle the quota files properly. They either don't back them up at all, or back up them up as sparse files.

Martin

[Martin Moore]

Let me add that if you're worried that the backup software is actually trying to backup the full length of the quota files, it is quite safe to exclude them from the backup. If you had to restore the filesystem from backup, AdvFS would manage the quota files on disk as files were added or removed.

Martin

[Gordon Morrison]

Thanks guys. We're using Tivoli Storage Manager for backups.
As the size of the quota files doesn't indicate a problem, I'll just exclude them from the backups.
Thanks again.

[Venkatesh BL]

The backup tools are usually 'intelligent' to just read the advfs extent maps and extract specific blocks. You could 'du' on the file to know the exact size.