Limits on storage and printing

All students, faculty, and staff in Engineering are given quotas for home directories, incoming email, and printing. This article serves as a guide for understanding and maintaining your quota.

• Disk Usage
• Email
• Printing
• Methods
• Checking Usage
• How to Reduce Your Email Usage
• How to Reduce Your Disk Usage

Disk and email quotas have 'soft' and 'hard' limits. The 'soft' limit is the amount that you should try to stay below. You are allowed to exceed the soft limit for a "grace period" you will be sent email reminders telling you how long you have until your grace period expires. Once your grace period expires, you will not be able to write any more files to your home area. In no case will you be able to exceed the hard limit for any amount of time.

Disk Quotas	Soft limit	Hard limit
Students	1.2GB	1.35GB
Faculty/Staff	3GB	3.5GB

Incoming mail quotas have a soft limit and a hard limit. As you approach the soft limit, you will be sent automated email warnings that you are reaching or have exceed your quota and that you need to reduce the size of your inbox. A larger 'hard' limit is then in effect for a grace period of one month. If you do not drop back down below the soft limit within a month, or if you exceed the hard limit your email account will become unusable. It's important to note that your email quota is only affected by what's in your inbox. Mail stored in other folders and kept in your home directory affects your Disk Quota.

 

Email Quotas	Soft limit	Hard limit
Students	35MB	50MB
Faculty/Staff	75MB	100MB

There is a 1000 page printing quota per term. Please note that as of Fall 2005, a page is defined as a side of paper. So, if you print a single page on a duplex printer, it will count as two quota pages (two sides of the paper), even if one side is blank. We have adjusted the quota accordingly. The printers that count against this quota are:

• Batchellor 041/045
• Dearborn 115/119/203/208
• Gleeson 02
• Graf 202
• Hovland 10/11/108
• Kelley 1130
• Merryfield 108
• Owen 237/241
• Rogers 338
• Various graduate office printers unless on special project arrangements

You can check the status of your print quota at TEACH. You can also find your print history for the current term there.

If this quota is depleted during the term, additional quota can be added by providing a ream (500 pages) to the College of Engineering IT support. For each ream 500 quota pages will be added. The additional quota only applies to the current term. (Where print quotas are concerned, a term's end will be defined as the Tuesday following finals week.)

Acceptable Paper:
Color: White
Paper weight: 20 LB
Size: 8.5" x 11"
Type: Copier / LaserJet multipurpose

A program is run nightly that checks home directory and email quotas. It mails a person if they have exceeded their quota.

You can check your assorted quotas by chosing 'Login to ENGR' on the TEACH web site.

• To minimize the size of your email inbox, use other mail folders within your home directory.
• Also make sure that messages that you are marking for deletion are actually being removed. Some mailers will not actually remove messages until you 'Empty Trash', 'Purge' or 'Compress Folder'.
• Most popular mailers will also have a configuration setting that will remove the deleted messages at the end of each session. We suggest that you turn this setting on.
• For Outlook Express, select Inbox, right-click, select properties, click Local File tab, click the Compact button.
• Check for large attachments in your email. Even with a small number of emails, you can be using a lot of space. All mail programs should offer a way to see the size of each email message.

• Common problems for people exceeding home directory (Z: drive) quota are 'core' files and not emptying the 'Trash' in the Unix window manager.
• 'Core' files are created when a unix program crashes. If you don't have a need to debug the program, remove any core files in your account.
• Also, when you drag a file into the 'trash' icon, it doesn't really remove the file, it just marks it for removal. To actually destroy the files, you will have to empty the trash . The specific directions vary by operating system.
• In unix, you can use the 'compress' and 'gzip' programs to compress large files. In Windows, you can use pkzip, winzip, or other available compression programs.
• In Windows it's important to store files on your Z: drive and not on your desktop. The desktop is part of your profile which gets stored on your Z: drive. The larger your profile is the longer it takes to load and the more prone it is to becoming corrupt.

Article Information:

Date Created: Jun 03, 2003
Last Modified: Wed, Jul 25, 2007 1:38 PM
Views: 17489