Things Every Xibo Admin Should Know About Storage

Xibo is a very easy to use piece of software, especially when you compare it to the competition (cough cough fourwinds ). Even so, it’s always nice to have a quick run down on features that maybe you haven’t come across before. So here is my list of things I feel every xibo admin should know about storage. We will focus on the application interface and not the back end.

Knowing how much space you are using is very important. Knowing this information can help with planning hardware upgrades or just knowing when we should tell users to clean up their library. Luckily, xibo gives admins tools to keep an eye on their storage and even limit storage usage.

The first thing to know about storage and xibo is where we can see the total storage usage. On the status dashboard, xibo gives us the total space used. If you don’t see this info upon logging in, go to the user’s tab and select ‘edit’ from the drop down menu next to your user name. From the ‘edit’ page you should be able to select ’status dashboard’ for the homepage field and of course don’t forget to hit the save button. From this point on, when you log in to your xibo CMS you will be greeted to useful information like total storage usage, number of displays, and total number of users on the system. High level views are nice, but sometime you want to have more details. As you probability guessed, xibo can give you these detailed stats too.

Under the “Reporting” section of the navigation is the “Library Usage” link. This page gives us two pieces of important information: user usage and library usage by file type. I use the user usage information a lot in my day to day job activities. I recommend checking the user usage often. The user usage information can be helpful to find users who are using a great deal of space unnecessarily. Based on what you see, this could lead you to impose storage limits on a per user basis.

Storage limits can be placed on individual users or user groups. The process is pretty much the same for both scenarios, so I will only explain how this works with users. When you edit or create a user, you will see a field called ‘Library Quota’. The library quota field tells xibo how much space a user is allow to use for their media storage in total. If the field is set to ‘0’ then there is no limit. On the other hand, an admin can give a value in kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes for the storage limit. Storage limits are the best way to control storage on your xibo environment.

Using the information above, you should be able to keep storage usage under control on your xibo environment. There are plenty of other factors to keep in mind on the back end side of things, but we will save that for a different blog post. If you don’t want to worry about back ups and such, check out http://mysignage.rocks.