Storage
Your account has one home storage area, mounted into every lab 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; it can be used 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 opens a browser of your home storage sorted by size, folder by folder, 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.
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.
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