By By default all Kent logins come with a personal file storage space, mapped as your Z drive, and with a quota of 300MB. This limit was raised significantly in January 2015 to 1 GB. The advice shown below still applies but screenshots etc were based on the older quota.
The Z drive (often shown with the server name “Bodiam”) is your default “My documents” location. Sooner or later you are going to find that this folder fills up and that you start to see warnings.
In the image above you can see that the Z drive folder (bottom-left) is shaded red because the storage quota is nearly all used. Your drive mappings will look different to this but the last one listed should be the Z folder, usually stored on the server “Bodiam”.
The obvious solution to this is to move or delete some files! Which ones to move will be a personal choice but if you’re stuck for time here is a quick way to free up space…
- Explore the Z drive and open the folder named “Essential-User-Settings”…
- …then open the folder “Softgrid” and it’s sub-folder “Softgrid Client”.
- You will then see a wide range of folders of varying dates and sizes. These contain settings/preferences for virtualised programs. (For example R, Maple, Matlab, and others found in the Central Software and/or Departmental Software lists.)
- You can safely delete any folders for applications that you seldom use, and can even delete the whole lot with few if any ill effects.
If you prefer to take a conservative approach a folder that is particularly worth targeting is “Icon Cache” which you may find contains many hundreds of small files but very likely also some quite large ones.
After leaving this folder intact for some time I found that 40 MB+ of data was stored here. All of these files can safely be deleted though over time they will gradually be regenerated.
Since 40MB is 13% of the disk quota by simply deleting this folder my Z folder usage went down from 90%+ to 78% – a quick way to buy some extra space until more careful housekeeping is possible. (Reminder: these percentages were based on the older, smaller disk quota of 300 MB.)