For ext* filesystems, you can use tune2fs to change the reserved block percentage to accomplish this in what might - depending on your preferences - be a more g

For ext* filesystems, you can use tune2fs to change the reserved block percentage to accomplish this in what might - depending on your preferences - be a more graceful way. Basically it lets you knock 8 GB or more (although it's a percentage instead, 5% by default) off of the disk space available to non-root users. When it hits 100% and things start breaking, that reserve can be used by root to do compression safely, move things around, and so on. Alternatively the reserve percentage can be changed with a single command (by root), to allow non-root processes more space while the admin contemplates what do do next. One nice aspect of using the reserve instead of a file is that it prevents runs of "du" for including the file in their results. Another is that it's pretty much impossible to accidentally remove the reserve (or for some other admin to find it and decide it's superfluous). This is less effective at sites that have a lot of services running as root, in which case only your approach is fully effective. I want to say "But who does that nowadays...", but it happens. tune2fs apparently also supports allowing members of a certain unix group or user to have access instead of solely root. The core command for all this is: tune2fs -m <reserved-percent> <device> One other thing you might want to worry about: inode exhaustion. tune2fs has an inode reserve % as well - and trying to emulate this by creating a few hundred thousand files instead would be... inelegant.