Disk Quotas

You have a /home/username directory and a /work/username directory. This disk space has quotas imposed on it to prevent us running out of disk space.

The default quota for home directories is 20 GB and for work directories it is 200 GB. This is known as the soft limit. You can exceed this soft limit for up to 1 week up to something called the hard limit (12 GB for home and 220 GB for work) during which time you will receive filesystem warnings on the screen ... after this time your account will lock-up.

If you require disk space beyond what will fit in /work, please ask the computing staff for a /data directory. The default quota for a /data directory is 200 GB. Users requiring more than 1.5TB please note that it may require some time to prepare such as resource, and it will in addition require faculty approval.

Your home directory is where you should keep your papers, codes and web pages. Your work directory is where you should keep your data, as this is reproducible, or items you won't need for long, or that don't change frequently.

The reason we have both /home and /work directories has to do with backups. Home directory backups are kept for a longer time so we need to limit their size.

Determining Your Quotas and Usage

To find out your disk and file quotas, execute the following commands:

ls /work/username
quota -sv

An example output for user 'test' is as follows:

Disk quotas for user test (uid 123): 
     Filesystem  blocks   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
pegasus:/vol/vol0/home/test
                  1320M   2048M   2500M           14656    134k    154k        
dionysus:/vol/vol1/work/test
                     28  51200M  61440M               6   4295m   4295m