Disk Quotas

Each user is allocated an initial disk quota along with their userid. This places limits on the amount of disk space a user's files can occupy as well as the number of files a user is permitted to own. Both soft and hard limits are defined. If usage exceeds the soft limit further file creation is permitted for a grace period of 7 days beyond which any attempt to create a new file will fail. Exceeding the hard limit results in immediate failure of all further file creation or expansion until usage has been reduced to an acceptable level. The system will issue a warning whenever an attempt to write to a file is denied due to a quota violation.

The current default initial limits are as follows:

Disk usage (soft) - 50 Mb
Disk usage (hard) - 55 Mb
No. of files (soft) - 5000
No. of files (hard) - 5500

In addition there are quota limits set on mail files:

Incoming mailbox (soft) - 10 Mb
Incoming mailbox (hard) - 20 Mb
IMAP folders (soft) - 5 Mb and 500 files
IMAP folders (hard) - 6 Mb and 600 files

The 10 Mb limit on the mailbox is intended solely to allow for transient high levels of traffic. It is strongly recommended that this file is kept below 1 Mb in size (and, if possible, below 0.5 Mb) in order to avoid rejection of incoming mail.

If you have a justifiable reason for requiring an increase in your quota allocation please contact the DPO Computer Operators.

Use the quota command to obtain detailed information about your disk usage and quota.

For further information about the quota command and some disk tidying hints click here.

[University of Cambridge] [Engineering Department] [Computing Help]

Updated on 15th April 2005

Stephen Mounsey, sjm@eng.cam.ac.uk