Quotas

What are quotas and how do they work?

Quotas are a system tool that helps to control the amount of disk space consumed by individual users or groups. Each user or group is assigned a “soft” quota and a “hard” quota. The soft quota is how much space the user or group is permitted to use under normal circumstances while the hard quota allows for temporary overflow of that allocation. When the soft quota is exceeded, the system allows the write operation to continue, but notes the overage and raises an alert (currently, only Web Services sees these alerts). When the hard quota is exceeded, the write operation will fail and the user will be notified of this failure.

What are the size and types of quotas being used?

User Quotas

Each user has a quota for their home directory of 5 Mbytes. The reason for this is because the only things that should normally be stored in a user’s home directory are files that configure their environment (such as a .profile). This quota should be more than adequate.

Site Quotas

Quotas are assigned to individual sites. Sub-sites of a site share in the parent’s quota. Each site has an initial quota of 500 Mbytes and includes files in the HTML and DATA (and CGI-BIN, if appropriate) portions of the site. Files stored on an external file share that are accessed by the site are not counted toward the quota.

Why are there quotas?

Quotas have been put in place to promote good stewardship by our developers. Data storage is not limitless and because each website resides in multiple places (on the development, qa, and production servers) the usage adds up quickly. For example, if you have a 50Mb site, the data is stored on the development (50Mb), qa (50Mb), and production (50Mb X 4) servers. This simple 50Mb site takes up a total of 300Mb of storage. Having quotas encourages developers to be aware of what is in their site directories and to keep only what is necessary in them. Developers are encouraged to go through and clean out old content that is not needed anymore if they have reached their quota. Finally, quotas allow Web Services to better track space usage and keep overall costs for the University down.

What if I need more space?

We are not here to restrict the amount of content on your website or force you to conform to a basic HTML page. We will work with each site if they need more space. We suggest first that you see if there is any old or duplicate content that can be cleaned out of the site directory. If more space is still needed then please contact Web Services to request approval for your site quota to be increased. We will take a look at your usage and make appropriate adjustments to your site’s quota.

How will I know if I’ve exceeded my (site’s) quota?

This depends on the tool you use to put content on the server. In most cases, you will get some kind of error when you attempt to write the new files to the system. This error might indicate that there is no space left, but more than likely, it won’t tell you much of anything except that it can’t write the file(s). If you were in the middle of copying several files to the system, and the copy fails after transferring several files, it is very likely that you might have hit your hard quota. Contact Web Services and we can check for you to be sure. We are currently working on tools that will provide tools to allow you to easily check your usage and let you know when you are approaching your quota.

Why am I getting errors when I try to upload files?

If you encounter the error below, you are probably exceeding your site’s quota.

  • Error when uploading a folder:
    • /var/www/html/root/HOST/SITENAME/FILENAME – error occurred – Unable to create remote folder /var/www/html/root/HOST/SITENAME/FILENAME. An error occurred. Please contact your administrator.File activity incomplete. 1 file(s) or folder(s) were not completed.
  • Error when uploading a single file:
    • Files with errors: 1
      /var/www/html/root/HOST/SITENAME/FILENAME
      DIRECTORYNAME/FILENAME – error occurred – An FTP error occurred – cannot put FILENAME. Access denied. The file may not exist, or there could be a permission problem.File activity incomplete. 1 file(s) or folder(s) were not completed.Files with errors: 1
      DIRECTORYNAME/FILENAME