I am newish to QIIME so I apologize if this is a very basic question. I am trying to demultiplex some bacterial data and I have run into the following error message several times:
"Host system reported disk full. VM execution is suspended. You can resume after freeing some space."
The command will run for about 20 minutes before crashing and giving me this error message. I am not sure if it is talking about the disk space on my windows machine or the virtual machine disk space (I am running QIIME through VirtualBox). I have looked at my windows machine disk space and it appears that VirtualBox is using about 118GB of storage, I have no idea why. When I look in deeper it seems that it is the QIIME2 Virtual Disk Image that is using 123,960,320 KB of space. I have no idea what any of this means or how to remedy it. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Hey there @jaaronson - this is an annoying situation for you, I'm sorry! Unfortunately, I don't have any pearls of wisdom for you - your OS is telling you your disk is full, you'll need to either clean up existing space, or expand with a larger disk. Neither is fun.
The error message above implies that it is your windows machine saying this.
That was what I suspected. The VirtualBox VMs is really the only thing taking up most of the space on my disk, is it normal for it to take up 118 GB of space? Also whenever I try to run a command I notice it takes up more and more space on my hard drive? I have gone through a microbial analysis workflow previously using the same set up and didn't run into any of these issues, I'm wondering if each time it crashes it is still storing information on my hard drive and that is what is taking up so much room?
Yes, its an entire computer with a GUI, plus all of your data.
Yeah, this is because each command generates intermediate + output data. The intermediate data is cleaned up periodically by your OS (this is the "temporary directory"), but the output data is never cleaned up, because this is your study data.
It certainly might be! You can usually "force" a temporary directory cleanup by restarting the VM's OS.