Managing Large Configuration Files

Home is the primary location for configuration files, and many software packages will automatically place configuration files in this location. Sometimes, these configuration files can grow in size such that the Home directory approaches its storage quota limit. If this issue occurs, it is simple to move the configuration files from Home to Work and place a link in Home that points to the new location of the configuration files in Work.

For instance, Anaconda stores its configuration files in ~/.conda by default, and this directory often grows to multiple GBs in size, consequently using a significant portion of the Home directory’s allocated memory. The ~/.conda directory can be moved to Work and can be replaced by a link in Home that points to the new location. This can be carried out with the following commands:

$ mv ~/.conda /storage/work/$(whoami)
$ ln -s /storage/work/$(whoami)/.conda ~/.conda