Check Disk Quota and Usage

The following commands will allow you to monitor the amount of disk space you are using in your home directory on the access point and to determine the amount of disk space you have been allotted (your quota).

The default quota allotment in your /home directory is 20 GB with a hard limit of 30 GB (at which point you cannot write more files).

Note: The CHTC access points are not backed up, so you should copy completed jobs to a secure location as soon as a batch completes, and then delete them on the submit node in order to make room for future jobs. Disk space provided is intended for active calculations only, not permanent storage. If you need more disk space to run a single batch or concurrent batches of jobs, please contact us (Get Help!). We have multiple ways of dealing with large disk space requirements to make things easier for you.

If you wish to change your quotas, please see Request a Quota Change.

1. Checking Your /home Quota and Usage

From any directory location within your /home directory, use the command quota -vs. See the example below:

[alice@submit]$ quota -vs
Disk quotas for user alice (uid 20384): 
     Filesystem   space   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
      /dev/sdb1  12690M  20480M  30720M            161k       0       0        

The output will list your total data usage under space, your soft quota, and your hard limit at which point your jobs will no longer be allowed to save data. Each value is given in 1-kilobyte blocks, so you can divide each number by 1024 to get megabytes (MB), and again for gigabytes (GB). (It also lists information for number of files, but we don’t typically allocate disk space in /home by file count.)

2. Checking Your /staging Quota and Usage

Users may have a /staging directory, meant for staging large files and data intended for job submission. See our Managing Large Data in HTC Jobs guide for more information.

To check your /staging quota, use the command get_quotas /staging/username.

[alice@submit]$ get_quotas /staging/alice
Path            Quota(GB)  Items  Disk_Usage(GB)  Items_Usage
/staging/alice  20         5      3.18969         5

Your /staging directory has a disk and item quota. In the example above, the disk quota is 20 GB, and the items quota is 5 items. The current usage is printed in the following columns; in the example, the user has used 3.19 GB and 5 items.

To request a quota increase, fill out our quota request form.

3. Checking the Size of Directories and Contents

Move to the directory you’d like to check and type du . After several moments (longer if the contents of your directory are large), the command will add up the sizes of directory contents and output the total size of each contained directory in units of kilobytes with the total size of that directory listed last. See the example below:

[alice@submit]$ du ./
4096    ./dir/subdir/file.txt
4096    ./dir/subdir
7140    ./dir
74688   .

As for quota usage above, you can divide each value by 1024 to get megabytes, and again for gigabytes.

Using du with the -h or --human-readable flags will display the same values with only two significant digits and a K, M, or G to denote the byte units. The -s or --summarize flags will total up the size of the current directory without listing the size of directory contents . You can also specify which directory you'd like to query, without moving to it, by adding the relative filepath after the flags. See the below example from the home directory which contains the directory dir:

[alice@submit]$ du -sh dir
7.1K    dir