Here are a few tips for managing the size of your Computer Science Unix account.
du -s -h /home/YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME
This command will give you your total account size. The “-h” stands for “human readable” and it appends a size letter, such as `M' for megabytes, to the output. The “-s” gives only the total for the file or directory rather than a break down for all directories.
du /home/YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME | sort -n
This will give you a list of all your directories and their size sorted by size (smallest first, largest last). This can help you identify where you are using a lot of space that you may have forgotten about.
Now that you have identified where your big stuff is, you have a few choices.
REMOVE IT! If it is something you don't need, please consider removing it. Disk space is a shared resource.
COMPRESS IT! While some file types (most notably jpegs and mpegs ) are already compressed, many files will shrink to 1/5 or 1/10 their size if you compress them with gzip or bzip2.
One thing you can do is move your files off this system and keep them on another machine or device such as a USB [pen|thumb] drive or even on a CD. If you want to back up your entire account, have a look at
http://www.cs.vassar.edu/sysnews/backups
Once backed up, you can remove whatever you do not use regularly as you could always restore it from the backup copy if you need it.
You could also use the same method to backup any part of your account instead of the entire account.
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