Using disk quotas windows 7

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View more articles by Rob Rogers. Windows Vista and Windows 7 will allow the administrator to limit the hard disk space of NTFS partitioned hard disks for each of the system account, so that the account will not fill the entire hard disk space when a computer is used by more than one user. System Administrator who creates the standard user account for a system can allocate the disk space for each user. In order to check that your system supports the disk quota open the Computer from Windows start menu and select the hard disk usually it will be your operating system drive C drive and right click the mouse button on the drive and select properties will show the type of partition for the selected drive check the below screenshot Once the system partition is verified as NTFS then you can select Quota tab of the same properties window for the selected hard disk partition to allocate the disk quota to the users of the system Check the below screenshot.

In Quota settings window in order to enable the quota management select Enable quota management to limit the disk space for users and also you can enable Enable disk space to users exceeding quota limit to deny the user if the users exceeds the quota.

Set the log for the disk quota will log the usage of the disk space by selecting Log event when a user exceeds their quota limit and Log event when a user exceeds their warning level. Warning level should be less than the Limit disk space. Click the OK button to enable the disk quota will show a message like below Once all the allocations are set then you need to select the user that you need to set by clicking the Quota Entries By default the assigned quota is applicable to the entire user and by double click on any users will open the Quota Settings window for the selected users and you can assign the limit and the warning limit for the individual users and click OK button to apply the changes to the select user.

Export and Import options are also available to export the Disk Quota and again Import the Disk Quota to some other system. Delete option is to delete the quota for the assigned user otherwise you can disable the quota limit by double click on the users and select Do not limit disk usage option will allow the user to use the full disk space.

By default Administrator account will have no limits; it can use the whole disk space. Built in Administrator account will have no limits and you cannot set limits to the built in admin account. This means that we will be using so called hard quotas. Hard quotas will actually restrict space usage, not only monitor it.

If we leave that box unchecked, we will actually use so called soft quotas. Soft quotas are only used to monitor disk space, and users can go beyond their limits. When that happens, we will be able to see that in Even Viewer. Remember that we set quotas on a volume level, for everyone. For the purpose of this demo we will use a volume which has MB of free space in total. Because of that space will limit disk space to 50 MB, and set a warning level to 40 MB, for all users.

The warning level that we set here will only be visible in the Event Viewer, meaning that users will not know that they reached the warning level. We can also choose to log all events in Event Viewer.