Home Directories¶

Accessing Home Directories¶

Windows macOS

Information for connecting to BlueBEAR home directories on a Windows system.

Note that if you are off-campus you will need to be connected to the University VPN. (See Remote Access Service for further information.)

Identifying Your Home Directory Path on Windows¶

Log-in to BEAR Admin with your University username and password.
Click on the “BEAR Identity Database” link.
Scroll down to the section titled “Home directory”.
Locate the Windows formatted path (see below). N.B. You can copy the link to your clipboard by clicking on the icon.
```
\\its-rds.bham.ac.uk\rdshomes\_letter_\_username_
```
Where:
- _letter_ is the first letter of your username
- _username_ is your username

Connecting on Windows¶

To mount/map the above path on Windows, follow the University’s general instructions for mapping a network drive.

Information for connecting to BlueBEAR home directories on a macOS system.

Note that if you are off-campus you will need to be connected to the University VPN. (See Remote Access Service for further information.)

Identifying Your Home Directory Path on macOS¶

Log-in to BEAR Admin with your University username and password.
Click on the “BEAR Identity Database” link.
Scroll down to the section titled “Home directory”.
Locate the macOS formatted path (see below). N.B. You can copy the link to your clipboard by clicking on the icon.
```
smb://its-rds.bham.ac.uk/rdshomes/_letter_/_username_
```
Where:
- _letter_ is the first letter of your username
- _username_ is your username

Connecting on macOS¶

Click on your desktop to focus on the Finder application.
In the toolbar, at the top of the desktop, click on the “Go” menu and select “Connect to Server”.
Paste the directory path (from above) into the field.
Optional: Click on the symbol (at the lower-left corner) to save the path for future use.
When you are prompted to log in, you may need to enter ADF/_username_ or adf.bham.ac.uk/_username_ in the username field.

Home Directory Quota¶

Warning

Home directories on the RDS have a limited quota of 20 GB, which will not be increased. However, it should be noted that home directories are only for the storage of small files, e.g. configs, SSH keys etc. – any other content, e.g. research data, job scripts & output files, should be stored in an RDS Project directory.
You can view a list of your BEAR projects and their respective directory paths via BEAR Admin.

If your home directory is running low on remaining quota you will receive a warning when logging on to BlueBEAR or using BEAR Portal. Please do not ignore these warnings; running low on available storage in your home directory can result in various issues which may not be simple to debug.

To view information on your quota, please run the my_quota command:

$ my_quota
Your home directory on RDS and Bluebear (/rds/homes/a/auser):
You are using 25.00 percent ( 5.00 GB ) of your total quota 20.00 GB

To see how much data each of your home directory’s subdirectories are using, run the following command in a BlueBEAR terminal:

You can increase the depth of directory recursion in the du command by increasing the value that you pass to the --max-depth option.
```
du --human-readable --max-depth 1 ~
```