Windows 8 : Working with file systems (part 5) - Working with quotas, Working with quotas for user accounts

10/10/2014 9:23:35 PM

Working with quotas

Working with disk quotas can provide a way to ensure that certain volumes allow each person using the computer to use only a predetermined amount of space. Consider the following example.

Fabio and Maria work for Tailspin Toys as summer interns within the marketing department. Fabio works on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturday mornings, whereas Maria works Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Friday afternoons, and they share the same workstation to conserve resources.

The computer Fabio and Maria use has an additional disk in it to contain their files. The disk has a maximum storage size of 1 TB and is backed up to the network every night at 10 P.M. To divide the resource evenly and ensure that one of the interns does not consume too much space, assigning quotas can allocate a certain amount of space to each intern.

You can assign quotas to entire volumes only. Each user receives an amount of storage space equal to the quota limit assigned. To configure quotas, complete the following steps:

Access the desktop and open File Explorer.
Press and hold or right-click the drive or volume on which you plan to configure quotas, and then select Properties.
On the Quota tab, tap or click Show Quota Settings and tap or click Yes at the UAC prompt. The Quota Settings dialog box is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. The Quota Settings dialog box, in which settings are defined
Select the Enable Quota Management check box to turn on quotas for the volume.
If you want to deny space to user accounts that exceed the quota, select the Deny Disk Space To Users Exceeding Quota Limit check box.
Choose one of the following options to limit storage space for new users on a volume:
- Do Not Limit Disk Usage
- Limit Disk Space To XX, where XX is the number of units by which to limit disk space
When you enter a limit for a quota, you also need to choose a unit of storage for the quota. Available units are:
- Kilobytes (KB)
- Megabytes (MB)
- Gigabytes (GB)
- Terabytes (TB)
- Petabytes (PB)
- Exabytes (EB)
Choose the warning level that Windows should use for the quota.
Select the unit of storage for the warning.
If you want to use an event log for tracking quota limits, select the Log Event When

A User Exceeds Their Quota Limit check box.
If you want to use an event log for tracking warning levels, select the Log Event When

A User Exceeds Their Warning Level check box.
Tap or click OK to save the settings for quotas for this volume.

Now that a volume has been configured to use quotas, you can enable quotas for user accounts on the computer. To do so, from the Quotas tab of the Properties dialog box for a volume, tap or click the Enable Quotas button. The results are shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7. A list of the user accounts that have quotas configured

Working with quotas for user accounts

In the Quota Entries For Volume dialog box, you can:

Add quotas to a user account.
Modify the quota warning and hard limits for a selected user.
Delete quota entries.
Import quota entries from a file.
Export quota entries to a file.
Search for quota entries by user account.

When modifying quota settings for a user account, if no quota settings are configured for the volume you have selected, you cannot set the quota limit, but you can configure the warning limit.

Using quotas can help you efficiently manage storage available to a group of people. Working with quotas helps keep individuals from consuming all the available storage space by allocating only a certain portion of the space to each person.