All students, faculty, and staff in Engineering are given quotas for home directories, incoming email, and printing. This article serves as a guide for understanding and maintaining your quota.

Disk Usage

Disk and email quotas have 'soft' and 'hard' limits. The 'soft' limit is the amount that you should try to stay below. You are allowed to exceed the soft limit for a "grace period" you will be sent email reminders telling you how long you have until your grace period expires. Once your grace period expires, you will not be able to write any more files to your home area. In no case will you be able to exceed the hard limit for any amount of time. A program is run nightly that checks home directory and email quotas. It mails a person if they have exceeded their quota.

For help on managing your disk usage visit: http://it.engineering.oregonstate.edu/managing-engineering-network-storage-quotas

Disk Quotas
Advisory limit
Hard limit
Students
14GB
15GB
Faculty/Staff 
14GB
15GB

Printing

There is a 500 page printing quota per term. The printers that count against this quota are:

  • Dearborn 115
  • Kearney 302
  • Kearney Atrium
  • Kelley 1130
  • Various graduate office printers unless on special project arrangements

You can check the status of your print quota in engineering PaperCut:  https://print.engineering.oregonstate.edu

Each currently enrolled student taking a class in the College of Engineering is allotted a print quota of 500 pages per academic term. This quota is for use only in College of Engineering labs and does not apply to other areas of campus. If your printing goes over 500 pages over the course of a given term, your OSU student account will be charged $0.10 per page. The sum of your printing will be charged at the end of each term.

A page is defined as a printed side of paper. If you print a one page document, it counts as one page. If you print a two page document in duplex, it prints two sides of a sheet of paper, so it counts as two pages.

Checking Usage

You can check your assorted quotas by choosing 'Login to ENGR' on the TEACH web site.

How to Reduce Your Disk Usage

  • Common problems for people exceeding home directory (Z: drive) quota are 'core' files and not emptying the 'Trash' in the Unix window manager.
  • 'Core' files are created when a unix program crashes. If you don't have a need to debug the program, remove any core files in your account.
  • Also, when you drag a file into the 'trash' icon, it doesn't really remove the file, it just marks it for removal. To actually destroy the files, you will have to empty the trash . The specific directions vary by operating system.
  • In unix, you can use the 'compress' and 'gzip' programs to compress large files. In Windows, you can use pkzip, winzip, or other available compression programs.
  • In Windows it's important to store files on your Z: drive and not on your desktop. The desktop is part of your profile which gets stored on your Z: drive. The larger your profile is the longer it takes to load and the more prone it is to becoming corrupt.

For more help on how to manage your disk usage visit: http://it.engineering.oregonstate.edu/managing-engineering-network-storage-quotas