There needs to be some law about how temporary directories always end up containing vitally important data.
Perhaps the solution is some netflix-like chaos monkey that randomly deletes files..;) Or for each user over its soft quota, delete the oldest files until under the quota. Or something like that..
The problem with a temporary solution is that it makes the problem go away, so suddenly there is no longer any incentive to fix it properly.
"Any quick fix that suppress the feeling of emergency will become permanent"
As a corollary, I wrote a few variants of a suggestion for an anti-quick fix permanence policy:
A: Ugly problems gets fixes first, so make your quick fixes ugly.
B: Every quick fix must be made exponentially uglier than its degree of crappiness.
C: Make your fixes transparent; have your fixes let the symptoms shine through from the original problem. And if the problem is silent, have the quick fix generate noise.
Definitions:
* Ugliness = how bad it looks to everybody involved, including non-technical bosses.
* Crappiness = how risky / exploit prone / buggy / inefficient / hard to maintain it is.
Justification: to maintain an appropriate degree of a sense of emergency.
Two days of unplanned downtime is more than twice as bad as one day (thus the exponent), as costs often grow exponentially. The apparent ugliness of the fix itself should drive everybody to implement a better fix, as they all want to get rid of it right away and NOT put something worse in its place.
Physical analogy: a lobby's unstable ceiling held up by a temporary pillar will remain unfixed with the pillar standing if the pillar gets painted, but will be urgently fixed if the pillar stays looking ugly.