My /home area is full ("over quota") -- what should I do?

Locales: Data Centers and Campus RC Northern Arizona University
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How do I see exactly what’s taking all my space?

You can check disk usage using the du command.
e.g.: du -h --max-depth=1 /home/abc123

Some things to consider:

  • use the --max-depth=N option to limit results to a maximum of N nested levels. A level of 0 will show only the target/current dir. If you don’t limit the depth, du will (kinda slowly) recursively total-up usage for every single file and nested folder.
  • use the -h flag to list K/M/G suffixes for kilo-/mega-/giga-byte sizes. If you don’t use this “human-readable” flag, raw number-of-blocks will be displayed instead.

Here’s an example of output you might see in your ~ dir:

[abc123@wind ~ ]$ du -h --max-depth=2 ~
1.6G    /home/abc123/.conda/envs
2.3G    /home/abc123/.conda/pkgs
3.9G    /home/abc123/.conda              # roughly equal to (envs + pkgs)
16K     /home/abc123/.rstudio/monitored
4.0K    /home/abc123/.rstudio/notebooks
4.0K    /home/abc123/.rstudio/projects
5.4G    /home/abc123/.rstudio/sessions   # ~100% of rstudio data is here
288K    /home/abc123/.rstudio/sources
20K     /home/abc123/.rstudio/pcs
5.4G    /home/abc123/.rstudio            # roughly the same size as 'sessions'
785M    /home/abc123/R/3.6.3
785M    /home/abc123/R
9.9G    /home/abc123

In this case, you could say that most of abc123’s (9.9 GB) /home usage is being filled by the “hidden” configuration/data folders for Anaconda and RStudio.

Further, one could observe that only the .rstudio/sessions/ directory accounts for ~100% of the usage within its parent .rstudio/ directory. (See below, if this applies to you.)

If you can’t see files/directories that start with dots

Use the “-a” flag (i.e. ls -a) if you want ls to show things starting with a dot.
(Please see this_other post about how to interact with hidden files on Linux systems.)

If you need to reduce your .conda directory

Please see this entry, in Monsoon’s FAQ:

If you need to reduce your .rstudio directory

Please see these articles from RStudio: