Usage of Disk Quotas in Windows 7

Before you start

Objectives: learn how to enable and configure Disk Quotas in Windows 7.

Prerequisites: you have to know what are Disk Quotas in general.

Key terms: quota, disk, users, space, case, level, limit, mb, warning, enable, entries, open, set, soft


Disk Quotas Tab

To work with Disk Quotas we have to open properties of our disk and then open the Quota tab. In our case we will work on our E volume which is called “Striped” in our case. The first thing we need to do is click on the “Show Quota Settings” button in order to view available settings.

 Quota Tab

Quota Tab

Disk Quotas are disabled by default, so the first thing that we need to do is to enable them. We do that by checking the “Enable quota management” option.

 Quota Enabled

Quota Enabled

If we check the option “Deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit”, we will actually enforce quotas. 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 500 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.

 Limits

Limits

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. In addition we can see all quota entries by clicking the Quota Entries button.

 Quota Entries

Quota Entries

Notice that Administrators don’t have quota limits by default. Here we can also add exceptions for specific users. However, we can’t add exceptions to the group of users. To do that we can go to Quota from the menu and select New Quota Entry. A new windows will open in which we have to find specific users. Notice that only object that we can search are Users. In our case we will enter the “ivancic” name and click Check Names.

 Select Users

User Selection

When we click OK, we will get a new windows in which we will be able to choose if we want to limit disk usage or not. In our case we won’t limit the disk usage, since this is an exception to the quota limits that we want to use for other users.

 ivancic Quota Limit

ivancic Quota Limit

All other, new users will have new disk quotas applied, which is in our case 50 MB (40 MB warning level). Note that in our case we have enabled soft quotas (tracking only).