check-quota.shtml

---
layout: default
title: Checking Disk Quota and Usage
---

<p>
The following commands will allow you to monitor the amount of disk
 space you are using on our (or another) submit node and to determine
 the amount of disk space you have been allotted (your quota).
<br /><br />
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).
<br /><br />
<b>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.</b>
If you need more disk space to run a single batch or concurrent batches
of jobs, please send an email to the address at the bottom of the page. 
We have multiple ways of dealing with large disk space requirements to 
make things easier for you.
<br /><br />
</p>

<h2>1. Checking Your User Quota and Usage</h2>
<p>From any directory location within your home directory, type 
<code>quota -vs</code>. See the example below:
<pre class="term">[alice@submit]$ quota -vs
Disk quotas for user alice (uid 20384): 
     Filesystem  blocks   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
      /dev/sdb1  12690M  20480M  30720M            161k       0       0        
</pre>
The output will list your total data usage
under <code>blocks</code>, your soft <code>quota</code>, and your 
hard <code>limit</code> 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 <code>
files</code>, but we don't typically allocate disk space by file count.)
</p>
<h2>2. Checking the Size of Directories and Contents</h2>
<p>
Move to the directory you'd like to check and type <code>du</code>
. 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:
<pre class="term">
[alice@submit]$ du ./
4096    ./dir/subdir/file.txt
4096    ./dir/subdir
7140    ./dir
74688   .
</pre>
As for quota usage above, you can divide each value by 1024 to get 
megabytes, and again for gigabytes.
<br /><br />
Using <code>du</code> with the <code>-h</code> or <code>
--human-readable</code> flags will display the same values with only
two significant digits and a K, M, or G to denote the byte units. The
<code>-s</code> or <code>--summarize</code> 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 <code>home</code> directory which contains the 
directory <code>dir</code>:
<pre class="term">
[alice@submit]$ du -sh <i>dir</i>
7.1K    dir
</pre>
</p>