Table of Contents

Disk quota

All users have a home disk (refered to as $HOME or ~ from the shell). This is the place where you end up when you log in, and it is also the place where many applications store their settings or local data, for the simple reason that it is the one directory that is know to exist for every user.

At our institutes, these home directories are on a central disk called /home which is served from a central server. This has the big advantage that your home directory is the same on all machines in the institute (except some clusters that have their own home disk). So settings that are saved on one machine, are in place on others as well.

There are two possible downsides to this:

  1. The disk is not local. So it is not the fastest storage are on the system. No problem for the settings, login scripts and so, but keep this in mind when storing big files
  2. All users share this same disk. So each user can only use a limited part of that disk. That limited part is called your disk quota.

Viewing disk quota

To see how much space you have in use, use the ´quota´ command. Please note that checking free space on the disk (ie: df /home) does NOT equal your quota!

Cleaning up

If your quota is running out, please check the following before asking system management for more space

  1. Is there research data in your home directory? This data could better be stored on data disks (locally on your workstation, or on central storage if you frequently need this data on other systems)
  2. Are there files in your desktop trash bin? As long as the files are there, they count towards your quota, so cleaning out the trash takes care of this.
  3. Are there e-mails in your mail trash folder or your spam folder? These too count towards your quota.
  4. Anything else you don't need any more (eg big downloads in your Downloads folder)
  5. Our page on Fedora tips has some additional information, about moving application data to places outside your home directory

If you have taken care of all that, and you still run out of space frequently, contact the helpdesk for advise or more space.