Home Directory Storage Quota

Home directories on the Mill have a soft quota of 50GB. At 50GB you will be warned that you are above quota, but your jobs will be allowed to complete. This is to allow for the possibility of jobs that write large temporary files that are deleted at the end.

At 60GB, there is a hard quota. If you attempt to write data after hitting the hard quota, your job will be terminated. You will not be allowed to write any more data until your disk usage is below 50GB.

Interaction with OnDemand

OnDemand sessions write log files to your home directory when they start. Therefore, if you are above your home directory quota, you will not be able to launch a new OnDemand session. There are two methods for deleting files to get back under your quota.

Deleting Files in the OnDemand Portal

The OnDemand portal does not show the size of folders, which can make this method less useful if you do not know what files you want to delete or where they are located.

Start by logging in to the OnDemand web portal via mill-classes.mst.edu for students or mill-ondemand.mst.edu for researchers. Click the files tab in the top left and enter your home directory.

Navigate through the folder structure to the files that you would like to delete to reduce your disk usage.

You can click on the '...' (1) and then delete for individual files. If you have many files to delete, you can instead select the checkboxes to the left of the files (2) and then delete all selected files with the delete button in the top right (3).

Deleting Files in the Terminal

If you do not know what files are using your disk space, we recommend using the command line tool ncdu. Begin by connecting to the Mill via ssh. Directions can be found in the Intro to the Mill help documentation.

When you have logged in, run the following command in your terminal: ncdu It will begin by scanning your home directory files. This may take a minute to complete the scan. It will display the running total disk usage while it scans.

When the scan completes, you will see the contents of your home directory. The size of each file/folder is written in the column on the left side. The bars comprised of # symbols represent the relative size of each file or folder.

Use the up/down arrow keys to select. You can enter folders by pressing the right arrow key and go back a level by pressing the left arrow key. Files and folders can be deleted by pressing the 'd' key. You will be asked to confirm any deletions. Finally, the program can be exited with the q key.