In general, we do not increase user quotas without the sponsorship of a member of the CS faculty. However, we find that most requests for more quota are not actually needed. Here are some tips for making the most of the disk space you have available.

1. You can use scratch space to store files temporarily. Just run "makescratch" to create a directory named "/scratch/yourusername". Be sure to read the information printed when you run makescratch regarding the use of scratch. The scratch partition is not backed up and files are auto-deleted after not being accessed for a week.
   
   
2. You can use nobackup space to store files. Just run "makenobackup" to create a directory named "/nobackup/yourusername". Be sure to read the information printed when you run makenobackup regarding the use of nobackup space. The nobackup partition is not backed up.
   
   
3. If you are working with a research lab that has its own file server, you can use this space. None of the lab-specific file servers use disk quotas so you are only limited by the physical space available. If this is the case, you have two options: 1) You could request to have your entire home directory moved from a departmental server to the lab server or 2) you could just get a data directory on the server to store files and keep your home directory on the department server. Either of these options require sponsorship by a member of the faculty for the given lab.
   
   
4. You should see which directories are eating up all your quota and remove unneeded files. You can use the checkusage script to find out which files and directories are taking up the most space. If you just run:

   checkusage

   it will report the disk usage in your home directory. You can also name a specific directory to check with something like:

   checkusage /u/janedoe/somepath

   The checkusage script just uses basic unix tools like du and find which you can use manually, if you like. For example, if you cd to your home directory and run

   du -s .[A-z]* * | sort -n

   you will get a sorted list of disk usage by directory. With this information, you can start looking for things to remove.
   
   
5. Check to see if you have any "core" files laying around. A core file can be generated when a program dies a miserable death and these files tend to be very large. You can run

   find ~/. -type f -name core -ls

   to list all of the core files that are in your home directory. If you are curious which program dumped core, you can run "file core" to see. These core files can safely be removed.
   
   
6. If you are running a Web Server in the burrow, there are a couple things you can do to clean up space after you install the server.
   • The apache src directory where you built apache can be quite large. You can run a "make clean" in that directory to clean up lots of space taken up during the build process but not needed after apache is installed. Alternatively, you can move the src directory off to your /nobackup space (see above) and leave a link behind by running something like:

     <cd to your apache directory>
     mv src /nobackup/username/apache_src
     ln -s /nobackup/username/apache_src src
     

   • Apache creates log files that will continue to grow without bounds unless you periodically clean them up. These will be located in your apache logs directory and are typically named access_log and error_log.
   
   
7. Web browsers (such as firefox and opera) maintain a cache of web pages and images you visit and this cache can take up significant disk space. You can adjust the amount of disk space used for this disk cache as follows:
   • Firefox - Select "Preferences" from the edit menu then select the Network tab from the Advanced category. From this page, you can adjust your cache settings and clear your disk cache. The cache files are stored in a Cache directory located in a subdirectory under ~/.mozilla/firefox.

   • Opera - Select "Preferences" from the File menu and then select the "Network" category. Under the "History and Cache" tab, you can set all kinds of options for the opera cache. Opera stores the cache files in ~/.opera/cache4.

8. If you delete files using a GUI (KDE or GNOME) "Trash Can", the files may not actually be removed. You will need to purge the files from the trash can before they are actually removed. You may find these deleted files in ~/.Trash
   
   
9. You can remove unneeded temporary files. For example, emacs saves backup copies of files you edit with a ~ extension. For example, if you edit a file named foo.c, emacs will create a backup copy named foo.c~. You can find all such files by running

   find ~/. -name \*~

   and can remove them by running

   find ~/. -name \*~ -exec rm {} \;

10. If you use MH to read your email, then you probably have lots of temporary files that can be removed. When you use "rmm" to remove a mail message, the file is not deleted but, rather, just renamed. So, if you "rmm 100", the file is just renamed to ",100". You may want to remove any file that starts with a comma from your MH folders.
    
    
11. You can greatly reduce your disk usage by compressing files that are currently not being used. There are several file compression utilities available, including gzip. For example, if you have a file named somefile you can compress it to a file named somefile.gz by running "gzip somefile". You can uncompress it back into somefile with "gunzip somefile.gz". You may want to look for large files that are candidates for compression using the find command. For example, if you wanted to find all the files you have that are larger than 10,000KB you could run the following:

    find ~/. -size +10000k -ls

    There is also a helpful program installed called "z" that makes file compression a breeze. For example, if you have a directory called "a343" that you are not currently using, you can just run "z -gz a343" to compress it into a file named "a343.tar.gz". If you need the directory restored to it's original state, you can just run "z a343.tar.gz". Run "z -h" for more information about using z.

    One caveat to all of this. You need to have some working space available in your home directory in order to compress files since the uncompressed and compressed versions will both be in the directory during the compression process. If you are already up against your disk quota, the compression may fail. If this happens, you may want to move the file to your /scratch directory (see below), compress it there, and then move the compressed version back into your home directory.
    
    

12. You can "strip" binaries to reduce their size. For example, if you have a binary called "foo" you can strip the file by simply running "strip foo". See the strip man page for more information.

If you want to request a quota increase, please have your sponsoring faculty member send an email to sysadm with the following information:

Student Name
Class or Project Name and Justification
Quota Increase Requested (ie. an extra 40MB)
Duration of increase (ie. until 12/31/04)

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