University of Florida :: Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE)

CISE Help & Resources

Home Disk Space

The main source of disk space for each user is in their home directory. Home directories are on disks provided by the department for general use. These disks are shared among all people with accounts on the CISE computer network (including all students, staff, and faculty).

Home disks are shared by dozens, or even hundreds of users. When a home disk fills up, no user on that disk can work. As a result, it is very important to keep strict control on the amount of disk space allocated to each user. This is done using disk quotas.

A disk quota is the amount of disk space that is allocated to each user. The user can use this amount freely, without any restriction or timelimit. A user is never allowed to exceed their quota.

It is very important that the user stay below their quota. If the user is very close to the quota, many operations may fail since the user will not be allowed to create new files. This is especially true of reading email.

Home Disk Quotas

The current allowed quota are:

Type of Account Quota
Guest/Class 500 MB
Undergrad/Student 1 GB
Grad 5 GB
PhD 5 GB
Staff 10 GB
Faculty 20 GB

Monitoring Disk Quota Usage

Note: Unless otherwise specified, the following commands work on both Solaris and Linux machines.

To check your home directory quota:

% cd
% quota -v

To check your mail quota:

% cd 
% cd Maildir
% mailquota -v

To determine which directories have the highest usage:

% cd
% du -k | sort -n

To determine which files in a given directory have the largest size:

Solaris

% cd some/dir
% ls -l | sort +4n

Linux

% cd some/dir
% ls -lS

To see how close a disk is to being filled is the df command:

% cd; df -k .

There are man pages on the quota, du, and df commands.

Efficient Use of Disk Space

Browser Files

One of the biggest single uses of disk space is the browser disk cache. If you are running near you quota, you may want to reduce or disable you disk cache.

To reduce your cache usage in Firefox:

  1. Select the Edit menu;
  2. Select Preferences;
  3. In the preferences window, select click on Advanced;
  4. Click on Network;
  5. In the Network window, reduce the Disk Cache size; and
  6. Click on Clear Now.

Unnecessary Files

There are many types of files which can (usually) be removed safely. These include:

Infrequently Used Files

Files that are not used frequently can be compressed using the gzip or bzip2 commands.

Miscellaneous Hints

Here are some sample commands to help you determine where the disk space is being used, and how to clean up.

To find all core files: % find ~ -name core or to find all object files: % find ~ -name \*.o

Relevant man pages are: find, du, quota.

Quota FAQ

I just became a grad student. How do I get a higher quota?
  1. Go to Account Registration.
  2. Select change your information
  3. Choose graduate student or PhD student as appropriate.
  4. Follow all remaining instructions and your new quota should take effect within a couple days.
My quota is higher than the policy. What should I do?
As stated above, in the past, quota extensions have been allowed much too freely. We are slowly trying to bring them back down to where they are supposed to be. Remember, the disk space you are using is provided freely by the department and is shared by over 1000 active users. Please do your part by staying under the official quota.
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