How to lose data: 1. A problem process eats disk space 2. Your email alert threshold is at 10% free 3. Your paging (wake me up) threshold is at 5% free 4. The ext4 reserved blocks are the default 5%. Woke up to FS at 5.01% free, a pile of <10% alert emails, and lost data.
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Have you considered triggering it with inotify or something? So something runs when a file is dropped, or the FS has X free space left. Though really, this is just moving the problem.
Eh, it's fine if it runs hourly. The problem here was the alerting; this was a case of "something was broken by consequence of human action and a ham should fix it".