If you are receiving email warnings that you are running out of disk space (i.e. that your Disk Usage is Critical or Full), you may need to delete some of the old or unwanted files from your account, or upgrade either your plan or storage.
Unless you free up some more available disk space your account/site may not function correctly. For example when the account limit has been reached you may not be able to receive any more emails.
To see which folders/directories and files are using the most disk space, click on the "Disk Usage" icon in the the "Files" section of cPanel. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you can expand the view by clicking the ">" next the relevant folders and drill down further.
Apart from the files required to operate your website, you may need to review the following types to ensure that they are not using up your disk space unnecessarily.
BACKUPS
When you generate a Full Website Backup using cPanel, the backup file will be placed in your home directory (by default) with a name like "
backup-11.12.2012_10-15-25_your-account-name.tar.gz
". You should download these to your own computer and store store them for future use and then delete the backup file(s) from your home directory.
MAIL
Depending upon the settings in your email client you may see that your mail directory is taking up a lot of space.
This is particularly relevant if you use IMAP rather than POP3 to access your mail. Please read the following Knowledgebase article, Is there a mailbox or storage limit?
- IMAP (typically used on mobile devices) leaves copies of your emails on the server indefinitely. You will have to copy these to local folders on your device before deleting them from the server. You can then use cPanel's webmail or your mobile device to delete the old messages.
- POP3 has a setting where you can define how long you wish to store copies of emails on the server. Usually this is set for a period of 30 days but should be checked. You can also use cPanel's webmail to delete these old messages .
MySQL (Databases)
Some applications use databases to store temporary information or keep historical log files. These can take up a lot of space (hundreds of Mb or even Gb) if not purged or cleaned regularly. Depending upon the application in use, check to see what "good housekeeping" tips there are for removing old or redundant entries from the tables in the database.
STATS
You can also remove old or unwanted files holding web reporting statistics from the following folders:
/tmp/analog
/tmp/awstats
You can download these to your own computer and store them for reference if required, then just delete the years and months you do not require.
You can upgrade your storage by moving to a different Pay Monthly website hosting plan by following the instructions at Can I upgrade my web hosting plan?
