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Home Space

Each user account is given a home space for personal file storage located at /mnt/home/$USER, where $USER is the environment variable of the user's login name. Alternatively, it can be accessed at ~/, though this shorthand may not work in some scripts. By default, it is only accessible to the user. It is often referred to as the “home directory” since this is the beginning directory after login of any HPCC node.

Every home space starts with a 100 GB limit for file storage space and can not contain more than 1 million files. To check the quota and used space of your home directory, see the Space quota section. Storage space greater than 100GB will require the use of a research space. If you would like to store more than 1 million files in a research space, please refer to the section Limit on number of files.

All home directories are stored in the VAST filesystem. It is automatically backed up with local snapshots. To restore any file from backup, change into the .snapshot directory and locate the timestamp directory that has the file version you want. Copy the file from this location into another location in your home directory.

For system security and user data privacy, we recommend that users do NOT open home directory access permission to others. When you report an issue about files saved in home, please attach them to your message for reference. ICER staff will not access any files or directories in your home directory without explicit permission.

Space quota

The only way to get quota information of home space is to run the command quota:

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$ quota
home directory: Space    Space   Space     Space     Files     Files     Files     Files        
                 Quota    Used    Available % Used    Quota     Used      Available % Used
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/mnt/home/$USER  50G      32G     18G       64%       1048576   432525    616051    59%

where all file spaces accessible to the user are listed, including home, research, and scratch. In each space, the information of quota, usage and availability on space size and number of files can be found. If "Free" or "Available" is a negative value (such as the "Space Available" column in the above example), the usage is over the quota, please remove, transfer or compress some files so the used space or the file count can be lower than the "Quota" value.

Warning

Currently our home file system check quota function will sometimes cause a user's directory over the quota due to incorrect calculation of used space.  If you see this please open a ticket and we will work with you to temporarily increase your quota.  We continue to work with our vendor to correct this issue.

Limit on number of files

Besides the quota on the size of space, users are also limited to 1 million files in their home directory. We need to set this limit because with a great number of files the file system will spend too much time on backups to be able to function normally. If possible, users can compress many files into one to reduce the file number.

If users do not wish to have the limit, then nodr research space should be used. The PI can request to have a portion of their research space moved under nodr space /mnt/ufs18/nodr/research/ by submitting a help ticket with the drop-down subject 'other' and secondary subject 'nodr request'. There is no limit on the file count, but there is no backup of these files either. Users will be responsible for their own backup of files in the nodr space.

By default, one half of the current research quota is assigned to the requested nodr space. The original quota under /mnt/research/ is then reduced to half the original quota so the total space quota remains the same. A different size of nodr space can also be assigned based on the PI's request. Once this space is created, the path and the quota information on both research and nodr space can be found using quota command mentioned above.

Backups

All home space files are periodically, automatically backed up (except those files that a user has opted to store in a previously requested legacy nodr space). To access file backups, change into the .snapshot directory and find the timestamped directory that contains the version you want. Copy the file from this location into another location in your home directory.