Disk quotas

Student accounts are subject to disk quotas. The purpose of these quotas is to avoid having the user disk fill up, which prevents everyone from getting any work done. The disk space currently available is ample, so generally the disk fills up only when someone is irresponsible or some software goes haywire. Therefore, the quotas are set quite high, at 50 MB. This limit is low enough to insure that no single user can fill up the disk, but high enough that most users should never run up against it.

However, if a number of users were to reach their quotas simultaneously, the disk could still fill up. Therefore, we ask users to be thoughtful of others, and try to keep their usage of the disk to a reasonably low value, say 10 MB or so. You can check your disk usage and quota status by using the command quota. (The amounts shown by the quota program are in blocks of 1 KB.)

If you have an important reason for going above the standard disk quota, contact the system adminstrators at help@dsm.fordham.edu, and explain your need, and they can increase your quota.

One source of high disk-space usage turns out to be web browsers, which tend to store a lot of pages in the disk cache. By default, Firefox sets the disk cache limit to 50 MB, which means you can run up against your quota. We suggest you use Edit/Preferences and click on the Advanced tab where you can change the disk cache limit to a smaller value, such as 10 or 20 MB. You can also use this tool to clear the cache at any time. By clicking on the Privacy tab you can find a checkbox that will direct Firefox to clear the cache upon exit. This can be a good idea, since you seldom need the cache for the next session. The Opera web browser has a default cache limit of 20 MB, which is small enough not to be a problem. If you want to adjust it, use Tools/Preferences, click on the Advanced tab and select History to set the cache limit or clear the cache. There is also a checkbox to tell Opera to clear the cache on exit.

We also try to conserve disk space by running skulker to clean up unused junk files in users' directories. See section 5.2 for details.