If you work in IT, you’ve probably dealt with many users who were always filling up disk space on shared servers, right? In Windows 7, 8, and 10, administrators can set disk quota limits on a per-user basis so that no user can fill up the disk.
Disk quotas can be used to track and control the use of hard disk space. Windows 7, 8, and 10 retain this quota management feature. This feature can also be used on a Windows home PC.
Set disk quota limits
To start assigning quotas, right-click the drive in Explorer and select the Properties menu. On the Quota tab, click the Show Quota Settings button.
Select the Enable quota management check box and also Deny disk space to users who exceed the quota limit. Click the Limit disk space to radio button and enter a value for the maximum space that the user can use. In the example below, I have set the space limit to 10 GB and the warning level to 8 GB. If you want to track when users exceed the limit, check the boxes for log events.
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Finally, click OK or Apply to activate the changes. You will receive a warning dialog box that Windows may take several minutes to scan the drive and update the disk usage statistics.
Click “OK” and after the quotas are activated, the traffic light should turn green.
Remember that this is set for each hard drive partition, so if you want to limit the number of other drives, you will need to follow the same steps above for each drive. It would be nice if there was a tool to set the space quota for each user on the entire computer, but unfortunately it doesn’t.
Also, if you want to set quota limits for each user, you need to click the Quota Entries button. This is really useful if you have children or other people using your computer and want to restrict the use of their hard drive, but not your own. You will see an entry for each user in the system and will be able to edit the restrictions for each user.
In general, though, nobody else is using disk quotas because hard drives have gotten so big. In addition, Microsoft now has other tools for IT administrators to manage hard drive space on servers. However, if you really want to use it, it still exists and works! Enjoy!
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