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AFS Quota

To increase security and reduce risk, Stanford is sunsetting its WebAFS service that is used to upload and download files to AFS.

To optimize AFS and make sure it is serving its intended functions, UIT has also taken these actions:

  • UIT no longer automatically provisions new faculty and staff members with AFS user volumes. New faculty or staff who need a personal user volume must submit a Help request.
    • This change does not impact existing AFS directories or the process for adding permissions for new individuals to those existing directories. Your existing space and everything in it remains intact.
    • This change does not impact the auto-provisioning of new AFS user volumes for students and postdocs.

​Class volumes do not expire and are kept indefinitely. This is an official academic policy, and any change to this policy must be considered by the Faculty Senate.

Your user volume has limited quota associated with it. The default is currently 5 GB, but you can add to that by taking classes that ask for additional quota for their students, or by getting additional disk space sponsored.

To see how much quota you have, type:

check-stanford-afs-quota

the line for AFS tells you how much space you have available in your user volume. If you use a UNIX mail client like Alpine or Mutt to download your mail to your home directory in AFS, any used space that shows up under "Mail", you'll eventually download to AFS.

If you are over quota (or if you have insufficient quota to download your new mail), you will need to clean up your account by deleting old files that you don't need any more. If you need help with this, please submit a  HelpSU request.

If you are getting error messages indicating that files can't be written and check-stanford-afs-quota shows that the sum of your incoming mail and the disk space you're actually using is still less than your existing quota, then you should check to see if maybe your AFS server's partition is full (this is highly unlikely). To check, type this command at the system prompt:

fs listquota <path to home directory>

If you are logged into a FarmShare machine, you can use the shorthand symbol ~ (tilde) as your path-to-home-directory. ~ is a special symbol which stands for your home directory.

The output from this command will display your quota allocation and usage in a more cryptic form than that displayed by check-stanford-afs-quota. But the last column contains a percentage-full number for your partition. If that number is extremely large (very high 90s) AND there is a warning flag displayed next to it, submit a HelpSU request, saying it looks like the partition your account is on is full and that it is interfering with your work.

Last modified May 1, 2018