What to do if I run out of space in my chip home directory?
Common Errors related to home directory storage
[$USER@c18-01 ~]$ pip install torch
Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Collecting torch
Downloading torch-2.6.0-cp39-cp39-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (766.7 MB)
|████████████████████████████████| 766.7 MB 2.6 kB/s
...
Collecting mpmath<1.4,>=1.1.0
Downloading mpmath-1.3.0-py3-none-any.whl (536 kB)
|████████████████████████████████| 536 kB 132.4 MB/s
WARNING: Additional context:
user = True
home = None
root = None
prefix = None
ERROR: Could not install packages due to an OSError: [Errno 28] No space left on device: '/home/$USER/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/nvidia'
[$USER@c18-01 ~]$ [$USER@c18-01 ~]$ mkdir newDirectory
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘newDirectory’: No space left on device
[$USER@c18-01 ~]$ [$USER@c18-01 ~]$ touch aNewFile.txt
touch: cannot touch 'aNewFile.txt': No space left on device
[$USER@c18-01 ~]$ Identify what is taking up space
By running the following BASH command in your home directory, you’ll be given an estimate of the storage used by your home directory.
[$USER@c18-01 ~]$ df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
nfs.iss:/ifs/data/chip/home/$USER 500M 384K 500M 1% /home/$USER
[$USER@c18-01 ~]$ This home directory is not full – it’s using about 1% of its allocated space: 500M.
By running the following BASH command in your home directory, you’ll be given a listing of files and directories along with their size. In the example below,
[$USER@c18-01 ~]$ du -sh ~/* .[^.]* | sort -h
24K .bash_history
24K .bash_logout
24K .bash_profile
24K .bashrc
24K .emacs
...
24K .viminfo
104K .sshIn the same home directory, you can see the sizes of each of the files. None of these are large enough to be causing a storage issue within this home directory.
If you find that you are approaching the 500M limit, or if you are receiving errors like the ones shown above, there are a few things you can do.
Things you can do
1. Configure the software you’re using to write data to your research volume
For Other Common Storage Errors: Common Storage Errors
2. Use Symbolic Links to redirect data to your research volume
Once you’ve identified the directory (or hidden directory) that’s taking up space in your home directory, you can use the following steps to free-up space in your home directory while still enabling the related software to connect with that directory.
Move the directory to your research volume
Moving directories can be destructive. Make sure that the mv command shown below won’t overwrite important data at the target location
[username@chip ~] mv ~/.largeDirectory /umbc/rs/${GROUPNAME}/users/${USER}/.largeDirectoryCreate a symbolic link from your home directory to the recently moved directory
[username@chip ~] ln -s /umbc/rs/${GROUPNAME}/users/${USER}/.largeDirectory ~/.largeDirectoryTest
[username@chip ~] cd ~/.largeDirectory
[username@chip .largeDirectory] pwd -P
/umbc/rs/${GROUPNAME}/users/${USER}/.largeDirectoryExample:
# Identify full home directory
[$USER@chip ~]$ df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
nfs.iss:/ifs/data/chip/home/$USER 500M 500M 384K 100% /home/$USER
# Identify large subdirectories
[$USER@chip ~]$ du -sh ~/* .[^.]* | sort -h
24K .bash_history
24K .bash_logout
24K .bash_profile
24K .bashrc
104K .ssh
497M .cache
# .cache is the large subdirectory in this example
# Move large subdirectory to research volume
[$USER@chip ~]$ mv ~/.cache /umbc/rs/$GROUP/users/$USER/.cache
# Create symbolic link to point to new location
[$USER@chip ~]$ ln -s /umbc/rs/$GROUP/users/$USER/.cache ~/.cache3. Delete data
This option stands to be the most destructive/disruptive if you make a mistake. DoIT Research Computing staff will never delete data from your home or research volume directories. Be careful when removing, copying, and moving data. Posture on Sensitive Data