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ERROR_DISK_QUOTA_EXCEEDED
Disk quotas allow Windows administrators to control and limit the amount of disk space that users use on the file systems of servers and workstations. Windows Server supports two types of disk quotas: File Server Resource Manager quotas and NTFS quotas. Though FSRM quotas are more flexible and convenient, in some cases NTFS quotas can be efficiently used. For example, to limit the size of roaming profile folders (but not User Profile Disks) and redirected home folders on RDS hosts, personal user directories on FTP servers and IIS sites, etc. In this article, we’ll walk you through how to configure NTFS disk quotas for Windows users.
Understanding NTFS Disk Quotas in Windows
You can use Windows disk quotas to limit the maximum size of files and folders for each user so that they don’t consume all disk space with their data. Disk quotas are available both in server and desktop Windows versions.
The key features and limitations of NTFS quotas:
- Quotas can only be applied to an entire NTFS-formatted volume (partition). This quota type won’t work on ReFS drives;
- Quotas are applied to all users who store their data on this partition. You cannot apply a quota to a group of users or a separate folder. In this case it’s better to use FSRM;
- File and folder ownership is determined by checking the Owner record in the NTFS security descriptor;
- By default, Windows scans a partition with disk quotas enabled and calculates the total file size of each user once an hour;
- When using NTFS compression, the original file size (before compression) is taken into account.
Enable Disk Quotas on Windows 10/Windows Server 2016
Let’s consider the case of NTFS quotas configuration on a disk containing user data on the Windows Server 2016. In all previous versions of Windows (starting with Windows 2003), NTFS disk quotas are configured in the same way.
To enable the quotas for this volume, check Enable quota management.
The following options may be checked depending on the scenario of quota usage:
- Deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit – prevent users who have exceeded the quota limit from writing to disk;
- Limit disk space to — set a limit on the total size of files for one user;
- Log event when a user exceeds their quota limit – logs an event in the Event Viewer if a user exceeds the quota limit;
- Log event when a user exceeds their warning level – logs an event when the quota threshold is reached.
It is not recommended to enable the option “Deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit” at once. It is preferable to estimate the current utilization of disk space by your users. In our example, we want to limit each user to 1 GB of disk space on the server.