Quota
The CLAS Linux Group will provide Linux home directories to CLAS Linux managed equipment, as follows:
Student disk quota: 30 gigabytes
RA disk quota: 30 gigabytes
Faculty and Staff disk quota: 30 gigabytes
This space includes backups as defined in the Backup and Recovery Policy.
Please see Personal Web Quota for web quota details.
There is unique user quota assigned PER FILE SYSTEM. Be sure to check your quota for each file system you have write access to.
From Windows, you can "right click" on the drive letter and select "Properties" to view your hard quota as well.
From Linux, use the quota -s -w command from at a Terminal window or Xterm window.
Each user has a soft quota and a hard quota. If you exceed the soft quota, you will have seven days to reduce your disk usage. After that grace period, or immediately upon exceeding your hard quota, you will not be able to write to any of your files. When that happens, you will not be able to login to the console of any workstation. (You still can login remotely.) Also, any work you do may not be saved. To reduce your disk usage, delete or archive old, unused, or infrequently used files and directories. There are several archive and compression utilities available - do a man tar, man compress, and man gzip for details.
Your account is intended to be used for educational and research purposes. If you exceed your quota, you may request more. (See the section Help Request Trouble Ticket System.) However, if the CLAS Linux Group finds that your use of disk space does not seem to be primarily for educational or research purposes, it may deny your request.
For more information about quota, use the command man quota.
Unfortunately, the output of the quota -s -w command can be a little hard to interpret, here's an example:
Under quota
$ quota -s -w
Filesystem space quota limit grace files quota limit grace
clasnetappvm.iowa.uiowa.edu:/homedirs 8809M 30618M 30720M 24 4295m 4295m
clasnetappvm.iowa.uiowa.edu:/homepage 4K 4000M 4096M 2 4295m 4295m This tells us that I'm currently using 8809MB in my home directory. My soft quota is 30618MB and my hard quota is 30720M. The grace field is empty since I haven't exceeded quota. I have 24 files and directories on this filesystem. The remaining fields indicate how many files I can create and mean there is no effective limit on the number of files.
Over soft quota
Filesystem space quota limit grace files quota limit grace
clasnetappvm.iowa.uiowa.edu:/homepage 4K 4000M 4096M 2 4295m 4295m
clasnetappvm.iowa.uiowa.edu:/homedirs 30633M* 30618M 30720M 26 4295m 4295mThe * next to 30633M means I am over quota, but I won't be blocked from creating new files until I get to 30720M.
Over hard quota on my home directory
Filesystem space quota limit grace files quota limit grace
clasnetappvm.iowa.uiowa.edu:/homepage 4K 4000M 4096M 2 4295m 4295m
clasnetappvm.iowa.uiowa.edu:/homedirs 30720M* 30618M 30720M 24 4295m 4295mThe * next to the first 30720M tells me that I'm over quota. At this point, any attempt to create new files will just create errors.
Over quota, now what?
You got the email or the error message that you are over quota. You'll need to start removing (or moving) your large files. If you use a graphical file manager, when you delete something, it just moves it to a trash folder. Start by emptying your desktop trash (right-click -> empty trash). If you are over hard quota, you may need to send a ticket in to request@divms.uiowa.edu to ask for a sysadmin to do it for you.
You can use the du command from the command line to discover your disk usage.
# find the big files or directories, sort them numerically (biggest ones at the bottom)
# output is in MB
$ du -sm * | sort -n
3737 smaller
# the above says, I'm only using 3.7G, but quota says I'm over 30G
# do the same usage, but check for hidden files and directories
$ du -sm * .??* | sort -n
0 .bash_history
0 .bash_logout
0 .kshrc
0 .lesshst
0 .tcshrc
1 .bash_profile
1 .bashrc
1 .cache
1 .canna
1 .cshrc
1 .emacs
1 .gftp
1 .gtkrc
1 .kde
1 .login
1 .xemacs
1 .zshrc
3737 smaller
26897 .local
# I see from the output that .local is using the most space.
# I can now focus my attention on just that directory
$ du -sm .local/* | sort -n
1 1
1 11
1 12
1 13
1 14
1 15
1 16
1 17
1 18
1 19
1 3
1 4
1 5
1 6
1 7
1 8
1 9
11527 10
15370 2
# I now see that ~/.local/10/ is using 11G and ~/.local/2/ is using 15G and can clean up as needed
# If you don't know whether it is safe to delete things, please send a ticket to request@divms.uiowa.edu