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Quotas

Quotas are used to keep track of storage space that is being used on per-user or per-group basis. Quotas are measured both in terms of number of files used and total size of files. File sizes are measured in terms of the number of blocks used.

Determine Quotas

Users can determine their quota usage by running the following command: 

quota -s

User quota on /home

Disk quotas for user <user> (uid <user_id>):
Filesystem   space   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
store-nfs-ib:/storage/home
              507G   1000G   1024G           2196k*   2048k   2098k
An asterisk(*) indicates the user has exceeded its quota of storage, and writes to /home/ are not allowed.

Command du -sh can be used to view the size of the respective folders:

login01:~$ du -sh /home/<user>/<dir>

Alternatively, users can use dust command, which prints out the tree structure of the directories, with the largest files in them. Depth of the tree can be specified with -d parameter.

Output of dust command 
login01:~$ dust /home/<user>/<dir>
  640G ─┬ .
  523G  ├─┬ ADMIN
  227G  │ ├─┬ qe
  226G  │ │ └─┬ benchmarks-master
  209G  │ │   └─┬ GRIR443
   59G  │ │     ├── GRIR.wfc1
   29G  │ │     ├── GRIR.wfc2
   14G  │ │     └── GRIR.wfc4
  128G  │ ├─┬ cp2k
  128G  │ │ └─┬ FIST
   69G  │ │   ├── nodes
   55G  │ │   └── nodes_new
   71G  │ ├─┬ python
   71G  │ │ └─┬ miniconda3
   36G  │ │   ├── envs
   34G  │ │   └── pkgs
   60G  │ └── orca
   68G  ├─┬ MD
   67G  │ └── Softbark_wood
   22G  └─┬ Docking
   16G    └── COVID19

Exceeded Quotas

If you exceed your storage quotas, you have several options:

  1. Remove any unneeded files and directories from your directories.

  2. Tar and compress files/directories from your directories. Since the write permissions are suspended, you can use your /scratch subdirectory to tar and zip the files, remove them from /home, and then copy the tar-zipped file back to /home or store them locally:

tar czvf /scratch/<user>/data_backup.tgz /home/<user>/<Directories-files-to-tar-and zip>
Verify the archive and delete original files: 
cd /scratch/<user>
tar xzvf data_backup.tgz # Verify the content 
rm /home/<user>/<Directories-files-to-tar-and zip>
Move data from scratch to avoid deletion: 
cp /scratch/<user>/data_backup.tgz /projects/<user>/data_backup.tgz
rm /scratch/<user>/data_backup.tgz
This procedure buys only so much space, thus should immediatelly follwed by downloading the data and storing them locally.

  1. Have the principal investigator (PI) justify the requirements for additional storage to be approved for the project.
Created by: marek.steklac