Home directories (Linux)
Your home directory, intended for important data that should not be
lost, is available
as /home/accountname on:
- all desktop PC's pclinXXX
- the remote linux desktop systems
- the compute servers
The daily backup comes at the price that the space is limited.
More space is available, without backup, on the
/scratch directory
on most of the Linux system's disks as reported by
df -h /scratch
Although not limited by quota, a part of that space (also not limited by quota) may already be occupied by other users.
The storage server can be used as secondary storage to the space on /scratch.
For files that you only need temporarily use /tmp
which is cleared on schedule. The available space is reported by
df -h /tmp .
Accessing your Windows home directory
You can access your Windows home directory using Samba.
Backups
Every night a snapshot is made of your homedirectory. These snapshots are kept for 30 days. They are in effect a backup of your home directory from which you can restore data yourself in case you accidentally delete something that was still needed.
The snapshots are available in the subdirectories:
.snapshot/nightly.1
.snapshot/nightly.2
...
.snapshot/nightly.29
where the .snapshot directory is a subdirectory of the directory that a particular file is located. The nightly directories are numbered newest first.
Therefore, the snapshots of the file
/home/account/intro.tex
can be found by entering
ls -lt /home/account/.snapshot/*/intro.tex
(this will list all snapshots, oldest last).
As stated above, this is the same for every subdirectory, so that snapshots for the file
/home/account/report/intro.tex
can be found by entering
ls -lt /home/account/report/.snapshot/*/intro.tex
These snapshots are accessible using the ususal Linux commands or file managers, but they are read-only. You can choose to restore snapshots by replacing the original file:
cp .snapshot/nightly.3/intro.tex intro.tex
or you can make another version by copying the snapshot to a new name:
cp .snapshot/nightly.3/intro.tex intro-concept.tex
Disk-quotas and dur
For information about your disk-quota BCF provides the "Disk Usage Reporter", or dur. It provides a report of your current disk usage and limits:
- Called without an argument it will print a usage message.
- The -q option reports on your current disk usage and limits. The .snapshot directories do not count toward your disk quota, which is why they are not included in the dur reports.
- If your disk usage approaches or exceeds the limits, use the options that show contributions by file or directory. The biggest files or directories appear to the fore.
If you need more disk space, you can ask for it at the helpdesk.
If you are trying to maintain software that is or will be used by more than one employee, please contact the helpdesk so that we can arrange for a standard software location.