Disk Quota

Your account on PythonAnywhere has a specific amount of storage space available for saving files -- Python scripts, images, data, or anything else you want. Free accounts get a disk quota of 512MiB; paid accounts get more, the exact amount depending on what kind of account you have.

You can view your current disk quota and the amount used on the dashboard and on the "Files" page.

Running out of disk space

If you run low on disk space, the text on the "Files" page showing how much you are using will turn red.

If you run out completely, it will show that fact there, and also when your code tries to write to disk you will get an error message -- something like this:

Disk quota exceeded

(If you were running a script via Python, it might come in the form of an OSError, but will include that message.)

How to find what's using up all your space

Open up a Bash console and use the du ("disk-usage") to find out how much space is being used in various places in your file storage:

du -hs /tmp ~/.[!.]* ~/* | sort -h

How to find the amount of disk space used

Number of bytes used in your file storage: Open up a Bash console and use this command to find out how many bytes are used:

du -s -B 1 /tmp ~/.[!.]* ~/* | awk '{s+=$1}END{print s}'

Cleaning up unused files

The files in /tmp/ are the most common cause of an unexpected quota max-out. It's usually safe to just delete them all:

rm -rf /tmp/* /tmp/.*

You can also clean up any old, unused virtualenvs with rmvirtualenv my-old-venv-name.

Other tips for freeing up disk space:

  • Uninstall python packages you don't need anymore with pipX.Y uninstall <package name> --user (replacing the X.Y with the Python version you installed the packages for -- for example, 3.8)
  • Delete your cache files with rm -rf ~/.cache/*