Storage
Your account has one home storage area, mounted into every lab (your own Linux machine in the cloud) that you run. This page explains how big it is, what counts against it, and how to find and clear what is taking the space.
How much you get
| Plan | Home storage |
|---|---|
| Free | 2.5 GB |
| Paid | 25 GB |
| Organization | 50 GB by default |
An administrator can set a different limit for an account or organization. While you are acting as an organization, the organization's storage and limit apply instead of yours.
What counts
| What it is | Counts against your home storage | |
|---|---|---|
| Home storage | Your files inside labs — your home directory, shared by every lab | Yes — this is the quota |
| Container layers | Anything your running labs wrote outside your home directory: installed packages, files in /opt, logs | No, but a lab's template may cap it, and it is thrown away on every redeploy |
| My Files (S3) | Things you uploaded to the dashboard: avatars, themes, attachments | No — tracked separately |
Because home storage is shared, a file written in one lab is in all of them, and filling it from one lab fills it for all of them.
Extra copies and scale groups
Extra copies and scale groups with isolated storage do not get a quota of their own — they count against your one allowance.
- A copy started with a fresh empty home counts for everything written into it.
- A copy started by cloning your home counts only for what has changed since the clone, where your storage supports cheap clones. Files still shared with the original are not counted twice.
Isolated storage for a scale group lasts until the last replica is removed.
See what is using the space
Open the user menu (top right) → Account Settings.
Account Limits tab — the Home storage bar shows used / limit. An enforced badge means the limit is a hard one (below). The refresh button re-scans usage; you can use it a few times every ten minutes.
Storage tab — Where your data lives, with a meter each for Home storage, My Files (S3) and Container layers, plus Storage Lens and Re-scan.
Storage Lens
Storage Lens shows your home storage folder by folder, sorted by size, so you can find what is big. You can delete files and folders from it directly; a few protected locations cannot be deleted.
It removes the files from every lab at once, since they all share this storage. There is no trash.
Using Storage Lens
The trail at the top starts at Home Volume — everything your account stores. Select a folder card to open it, and select any part of the trail to go back up. The chip at the end of the trail is the size of the folder you are in.
Each card shows a folder or file with its size, how many items it holds, and when it was last modified. Items are sorted largest first, and the biggest ones are highlighted. When a folder holds many small items, the smallest are grouped into one Other (N items) card.
At the top level you see these entries:
| Entry | What it is |
|---|---|
| Home directory | Your home directory, shared by every lab |
| Lab: name | Files a particular lab keeps for you, shown with the lab's icon |
| Deployments copy | The storage of your isolated copies. Inside, each one is Copy: name. |
| Trash (restorable) | Storage of copies you moved to the Trash. It still takes space until it is restored or purged. |
| Cache, Received transfers | Cached data, and files transferred to you |
Copies share space with your home. A copy made by cloning your home carries a shared · measure badge. Select it to measure how much of the copy has changed — real extra space — and how much is still shared with your home at no extra cost. Measuring is limited, so you may be asked to wait.
The bar at the top is split the same way: your home and labs, then the changed part of your copies, then the shared part, which is free. It turns amber above 70% of your limit and red above 90%. When you are over the limit, a red banner says You are over your storage limit — new writes are blocked until you free space.
Deleting. Every card you are allowed to delete has a bin button. The dialog shows the size and says This cannot be undone. For anything of 1 GB or more, you must also check I understand this permanently deletes … before Delete works. After deleting, you see Freed … and the figures update. Home directory, Deployments copy, Trash (restorable) and each copy's own folder cannot be deleted, but what is inside them can.
The Lens counts how many re-scans you have left. Opening many folders in a short time pauses measuring for a few minutes; folders you already opened still open straight away.
You can also clean up from a lab's terminal:
du -sh ~/* ~/.[!.]* 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -20
Common culprits are node_modules, Python virtual environments, package
caches under ~/.cache, Docker images saved as files, and old logs.
When storage is full
If your limit is enforced:
- files already there stay readable;
- new writes fail — saving a file, installing into your home directory, a database writing its data files — usually with No space left on device or Disk quota exceeded.
Free space (Storage Lens or the terminal), then Re-scan so the dashboard shows the new figure. See Storage full.
When the daily measurement finds you over your limit, you also get a notification saying how much you use against your limit. It is repeated at most about once a week while you stay over.
Where the limit is not enforced, usage is still measured and shown, but writes are not blocked at the limit.
What survives a redeploy
| Where | On stop, redeploy or expiry |
|---|---|
| Your home directory | Kept |
| Folders the lab's template persists for you | Kept |
Everything else — installed packages, /opt, /etc, /tmp | Reset |
When a lab comes back after expiry, you may see all data inside this lab has been reset except your home directory — that is this rule. Reinstall packages from a startup script so they come back on every deploy.
Storage pool migration
On some platforms the Storage tab also shows Storage pool migration, which moves your entire home to a different storage pool — for example one that supports cheap clones. All your labs must be stopped first, the move is a verified full copy, and nothing is deleted until the copy is checked.
While a migration runs, deploys are refused with A storage migration is in progress for this account — deploys resume when it completes.
Do it with an AI assistant
You can also do this by asking an AI assistant connected to your account — see Connect an AI assistant to set one up.
| Ask | What the assistant does |
|---|---|
| “How much storage am I using?” | storage_usage |
| “Measure it again now — I just deleted a big folder” | storage_usage with a refresh |
| “How much storage is my organization using?” | storage_usage for the organization |
| “What is taking up space in my home directory?” | Runs a disk-usage command in a running lab with run_command |
Usage is measured once a day unless you ask for a refresh, and refreshes are limited to a few every ten minutes. The assistant can report usage but does not delete anything for you — free space from the dashboard as described above.
Next
- Running extra labs — shared versus isolated storage
- Plans and limits
- Storage full