Windows Server 2022: Disk Quota Overview

What is disk quota management?

Disk quota management is a feature in Windows Server 2022 to impose limits on how much storage a user account is allowed to utilize.

Why is disk quota management critical?

Managing the amount of space that a user may use, as well as enforcing a policy of the type of files they may save, assists the IT administration team in ensuring that the available storage space is not used disproportionately by a small number of users.

What file systems support disk quotas?

Disk quotas can be managed in both Windows and Linux systems.
For Windows systems, Windows Server 2000 or newer is required and only supports the NTFS file system.
For Linux systems, ext2, ext3, ext4, and XFS filesystems are supported.

Who can enable disk quotas?

Any member of the administrator group can enable this feature for the organization.

What types of limits are available?

There are two types of limits. Soft and hard.
Soft limits can be exceeded with warnings.
Hard limits cannot be exceeded.

Practical example

In this scenario, we have three user accounts allocated an equal amount of storage space on our server.
Each user account has been given a soft limit of 8 GB.
Each user account has been given a hard limit of 10 GB.

User 1 is on 7.9 GB and saves one file of 200 MB.
This now takes the current disk usage to 8.1 GB.
User 1 will receive a warning that they have exceeded the soft limit but can continue to save information.

User 1 ignores the soft limit and attempts to save a 3 GB file.
As User 1 is currently on 8.1 GB, this would require up to 11.1 GB.
User 1 will receive an error message due to insufficient space.
User 1 has three options:

Delete enough files to free up the required space.
Move ownership to User 2 or User 3.
Request additional space from the IT administrator.

Conclusion

Control of shared storage space is invaluable to the IT administration team.
Please refer to our step-by-step guide on how to implement disk quotas on Windows Server 2022 next.