All Engineering accounts are subject to storage quotas for home directories on our file server (stak). These are the files you find on your on your "Z drive and includes Desktop and 'My Documents' storage on engineering computers. There are separate quotas on research servers, such as depot, mohr, or guille. This article serves as a guide for understanding and maintaining your quota.

About Disk Quotas

Disk quotas have 'soft' and 'hard' limits. The 'soft' limit is the amount that you should try to stay below.

In no case will you be able to exceed the hard limit.

The current disk quotas on the engineering home directory on stak (also known as the "z drive") is currently:

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

For more information on your research quotas, contact your major professor or email support.

Checking Disk Quotas

You can check your disk quotas for your home directory on stak, by logging into T.E.A.C.H.
Once you've logged into T.E.A.C.H, navigate to "Disk and Email Quota Usage" on the right hand side under the "Account Tools" section.
This will show you how much of your quota is being used and how close you are to your quota limit.
If you would like a quick view of what is taking up disk, below the mail quota box is a link (highlighted in the picture) that will list files and folders descending in size.

Check Quota with TEACH

Managing Your Disk Usage

Finding your folders

Finding which folders and files are large can be daunting. Simply right-clicking and looking at the properties of a directory can give you an idea, as can the quota tool mentioned above in T.E.A.C.H.

Folder Properties

The college computer labs has a statistics viewer and cleanup tool installed called Windirstat. It is available on all the windows desktop computers in engineering, in the the apps directory (V:).

Checking disk usage using Linux

A quick way to view your disk usage from a unix shell is to use du -h -d 1 | sort -h

A typical sorted output of the du command

Cleaning up your disk space

Unnecessary or old files can be removed to clear up disk space or moved to alternative storage.

  • Emptying the Downloads directory in "Z:\Windows.Documents\Downloads"
  • Check your Desktop - located in "Z:\Windows.Documents\Desktop" - for old or not needed folders and or files
  • Check your Documents folder - located in "Z:\Windows.Documents\My Documents" - for old or not needed files
  • Empty recycle bin

CAREFUL! - do not delete files starting with a " . " (e.g. ".fontconfig")

Commonly Large Folders
\Windows.Documents\My Documents
\Windows.Documents\Downloads
\Windows.Documents\Desktop
Core files: Files that are created when Unix programs crash.
If you don't have a need to debug, delete these to free up space

Restoring deleted files

If you accidently delete a file or directory it can be restored. For help on how to restore visit: http://it.engineering.oregonstate.edu/restore-using-snapshots

Using Alternative Storage

Oregon State University offers several services that can be used as alternative storage. More information about these services are available here