Quotas

This page contains some computing terminology which may not familiar to some users. If you require further explanation please contact your Faculty IT team.

Quotas?

Each share has two types of quotas: Advisory Quotas are tripped if a share becomes nearly full; Hard Quotas act as a firm limit on the amount of data that can be written to a share.

What happens if I reach the hard quota?

You will see an error message and your data will not be written to your share.

You may also receive an email from san-ops, which looks like this:

From: "san-ops@notary.mcc.ac.uk" 
To: Joe Bloggs <joe.bloggs@manchester.ac.uk>
Subject: Disk quota exceeded
Date: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 01:06:31 +0000
 
The hard disk quota on directory 
/ifs/nas/reynolds/research/NONFAC/CIFS/snapped/replicated/RITest 
owned by DS\emc on isilon-r01-4 was exceeded.
 
The quota limit is 4.0 GB, and 5.7 GB is currently in use.  
You may be able to free some disk space by deleting unnecessary 
files.  If your quota includes snapshot usage, your administrator 
may be able to free some disk space by deleting one or more 
snapshots.  Contact your system administrator for details. 

MS Windows

The application being used will pop up an error window advising that the operation cannot be completed. For example:

Cannot copy file: Not enough quota is available to process this command.

To see how much space is available

1. Open Computer
2. Right-click on the mapped network drive
3. Select Properties from the popup menu. The used and free space will be reported.

OS-X

Linux

You may see error messages such as:

Input/output error

You can confirm that the error is because your quota has been reached by using the command

df -h /path/myshare

replacing /path/myshare by the path to the mount point of your share and the name of your share. Assuming your quota has been reached, the “Use” figure will be 100%, for example:

Filesystem                                  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
//nasr.man.ac.uk/RITest$                    4.0G  4.0G     0 100% /mnt/ritest

Can I get my quota increased?

To request a quota increase, you should contact your Faculty IT team.

Why does my share appear full when it is not?

My share reports that it is full and I cannot write any new files. Yet the total space used by the files is much less than my quota. What is going on?

The most likely cause of this is that your snapshots are taking up quota space. If you create and then later delete some large files, snapshots will take up a significant mount of your quota. This effect will last for 35 days.