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 our (or another) submit node and to determine the amount of disk space you have been allotted (your quota).

If you also have a /staging directory on the HTC system, see our staging guide for details on how to check your quota and usage.
The default quota allotment on CHTC submit nodes is 20 GB with a hard limit of 30 GB (at which point you cannot write more files).

Note: The CHTC submit nodes are not backed up, so you will want to 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. 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 User Quota and Usage

From any directory location within your home directory, type 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 blocks, your soft quota, and your hard limit at which point your jobs will no longer be allowed to save data. Each of the values given are 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 ` files`, but we don't typically allocate disk space by file count.)

2. Checking the Size of Directories and Contents

Move to the directory you'd like to check and type du . After several moments (longer if you're directory contents 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