On our fileservers

System Support can grant you extra disk quota, but your supervisor has to support your request

They will need to email System Support and include the following details:

Be sure to discuss these details with your supervisor before making the request.

Extra space in your home directory

Extra disk quota is straightforward, so long as it's needed for your work.

You should clean out any junk or un-needed files before you request more space.

In most cases, we can only grant up to a few extra gigabytes in your home directory - if you need more than this, talk to System Support.

If you need space for data that can be easily re-created, we can provide scratch space on an appropriate file server.

We do not back up scratch space, so it's not suitable for any data you're not prepared to lose in case of a disk failure.

Scratch space is usually kept on our computing clusters, and is usually only available for people using the clusters for computing.

As well as your home directory, you also have access to the UNSW home file space.

Files stored there don't count against your CSE disk quota.

These are standard temp directories on every Linux lab machine and login server, for storing temporary files and runtime data.

You can put your own files in them without affecting your disk quota, but there are some important things you need to know:

As the name suggests, they are for temporary, disposable data only.
They are not backed up, and files in there may be deleted at any time, with no warning.
They are a shared resource for all users, and a lot smaller than our file servers.
You must delete your files there after you have finished using them.
If they fill up, System Support will clean them out to make room for others to use.
/tmp is cleaned out every reboot
/var/tmp is not (but files over a week old may be automatically deleted), and generally has more space available.
Because they're kept on local storage, they have very fast disk access, but are not shared across the network.