Limit disk usage for existing Windows 2000 users

by Jim Boyce | Mar 28, 2005 6:14:00 PM

Tags: disk, Jim Boyce, quota, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows 2000

Takeaway: Users have a knack for filling up a lot of disk space. If you're looking for a way to control the amount of disk space each user can use in Windows 2000, find out how you can configure quotas on NTFS volumes and configure quota assignments.

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Windows supports the use of disk quotas on NTFS volumes, which enables you to configure quota settings globally for a volume. However, you cannot set quotas differently on subfolders of a volume. You can set quotas differently for each user, if needed, giving specific users more or less space than others.

To configure quotas on a volume, follow these steps:

Open My Computer, right-click the volume, and choose Properties.
Press the Quota tab, select Enable Quota Management, and click OK.

On the Quota tab, you configure settings that determine the amount of space allocated to each user and how Windows reacts when a user nears and/or exceeds the quota limit. If you set quota values here and take no other configuration action, all new users will receive the assigned quotas. Existing users will not have quotas assigned to them.

To configure quota assignments for existing users, which enables you to also set quotas differently per user, follow these steps:

Press the Quota Entries button to open the Quota Entries window.
Go to Quota | New Quota Entry.
Choose or enter the user name, click Add, and then click OK.
In the resulting Add New Quota Entry dialog box, choose the option Limit Disk Space To and set the maximum space in kilobytes and the warning level. Then, click OK.

Repeat the process to add quota entries for other existing users.

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