Turnkey Linux File Server recycle directory

Looking at the Samba vfs_recycle man page I can't see any support for limiting the recycle bin size. There are file size limits there, although I'm not sure if they're adjustable within Webmin. If not, the config file is /etc/samaba/smb.conf and you can use the pre-installed 'nano' to edit it (it's a commandline text editor which is somewhat like Notepad).

So bottom line, I don't think that what you want is possible OOTB.

However, this is Linux, so (pretty much) anything is possible if you really want it! :)

Digging in a bit deeper, I note that it's possible to adjust the timestamps when moving to the recycle bin. There is also a tool called tmpreaper which will clean up files based on timestamp. That still doesn't meet your requirements re filesize, but using these bits, together with a function to get file tree size, we could create a (daily?) cron job to check the size of the .recycle directory and if it's over a certain size, remove files older than X days. Then recheck the file tree size and if it's still not the desired size, reduce the age filter by a day and clean again. Rinse and repeat until the .recycle directory is smaller than the desired size. So to put all this together, here is that basis of a script (perhaps save it as /usr/local/bin/recycle-cleanup?!):

#!/bin/bash -e
KEEP_DAYS=61 # default time to keep; in days + 1
KEEP_SIZE=512 # default file tree size to keep; in MB
RECYCLEBINS="/srv/storage/docs " # space separated list of recyclebin locations
treesize() {
    # return the disk space size (in MB) used by the filetree
    du -cms "${@}" | grep total | tr '[[:space:]]' '+' | cut -d+ -f1
}

for recyclebin in ${RECYCLEBINS}; do
    while [[ "$(treesize ${recyclebin})" -gt "${KEEP_SIZE}" ]]; do
        KEEP_DAYS=$((KEEP_DAYS-1))
        tmpreaper --verbose ${KEEP_DAYS}d ${recyclebin}
    done
done

Please note that I haven't tested this at all so it may requires some more tweaking. Plus I haven't described how we might set this up as a cron job. However, I've already spent more time on this than I ideally should have. So please let me know if you want to proceed and I'm happy to work with you to get this working as desired.

Glad that my ideas got you pointed in the right direction and ended up being useful; albeit in a somewhat indirect way. :)

Greetings again Jeremy:

I like your solution and do appreciate your time throwing something together.  I will play with your script more in the future - it gave me a few ideas.

I have some scripts that are triggered in crontab to automatically tar a series of vzdump (Proxmox backups) of numerous containers and virtual machines.  These can get large in size and deleting the old ones over a period of time silently chewed up a noticeable amount of my pool storage!  I found the culprits in my .recycle directory.

It looks like I can modify the config file and use recycle:exclude_dir to exclude the directory that I use specifically for bakcups to solve my problem.  Thank you for pointing me to Samba VFS recycle man page!