I moved to a new house and in order to reduce risk of being disqualified, I am using my mobile phone connectivity.
In order to reduce mobile data usage, I’ve reduced the storage allocated to each of my node (STORAGE environment variable). This temporary configuration shouldn’t last more than few days (only until tonight - UTC-4 - if everything goes well).
I’m just wondering: is it a bad thing doing this? Is it a bad thing keeping an overused space (even if there is still space on the disk itself)?
As far as I know, there is no problem having a node with over used space. Of course if one didn’t purposely reduce their allocated space and they saw overused space, it could indicate an issue.
Currently the only way to “gracefully” reduce the amount of space your node uses is to do as you did and wait for the used space to eventually be freed. This has been the official Storj advice in that regard.
I ran a node for more than a year with heavy overuse because I wanted to lower it (and also test the size reduction that would take place).
There have been no issues, but don’t expect to be able to use this to reduce the size much. I don’t think it ever lost more than 10-15%.
I ran into a bad spot on my drive that kept cratering the node multiple times a day. The bad spot was out towards the end of the drive so I reduced my allocated space by 800 Gig to avoid the system referencing the bad block during writes. Hoping this will allow my node to operate properly until I can replace/repair the drive. Since I reduced the size, I am no longer getting new pieces which is expected but I am still servicing the files that I do have and the overused will decrease over time as pieces get deleted