data proliferation or the data that ate the disk space

[Richard Taylor]

Hello LIST

this is not just a MapServer question, but perhaps some of you farther down 
the path have insights that you are willing to pass on.

As my learning curve progresses i find that local data volume is increasing 
rapidly. It started of course with local apps, then expanded with my 
introduction to MapServer, in my case ms4w, for getting the basics, then has 
continued on to local directories to send up to remote unix system 
instances.

While the mapfiles allow one to give a full path to your data, meaning 
locally you can get at it wherever it is, that structure does not hold well 
with or all with remote instances. the end result is multiple copies of many 
files, some of which are quite large, one for local apps, one for ms4w, and 
one for each remote mapserver.

One solution is to keep getting large storage space but feeling this might a 
common problem wonder if any of the long term users or those with large data 
volumes have come to a 'best practises' solution to this issue.

thanks in advance

richard taylor