Home storage quota
Every home directory of your HU account on the institute’s file server has a limit on the space it may use. This page explains the limits, how to check your usage and what happens when your home is full.
Which limits apply?
The same limits for every home, without exceptions. Almost all homes are far below: half use less than 1 GB, 99 % less than 25 GB.
| Limit | Size | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| soft limit | 70 GB | may be exceeded for up to 7 days (grace period) |
| hard limit | 90 GB | writes blocked immediately, no grace period |
Everything inside your home counts – including files owned by another account. The number of files is not limited.
How full is your home?
In a terminal on an institute machine, for example in the pool or via SSH:
$ df -h ~ # home usage
$ du -sh ~/* ~/.[!.]* 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -20 # the 20 largest entries
Common space hogs: ~/.cache, Conda and Python environments, output of computations, the trash (~/.local/share/Trash) and downloads.
What happens when your home is full?
- Above 70 GB: you have 7 days to bring usage back below 70 GB. After that your account cannot write to its home until it is below again.
- Above 90 GB: writes are blocked immediately.
- Error message: programs report
No space left on device. Desktop login, browser and mail client may stop working properly as well.
Questions?
Write to the IT helpdesk at help.math@hu-berlin.de. How your data is backed up and how to recover deleted files is explained under Storage & backup.