How-to Setup Disk Quotas in Windows Vista

Learn how to configure disk quotas in Windows Vista to limit the amount of disk space a user can use on a single computer.

Let’s say you have a family computer with 4 users who all login with a different user account. This guide shows you how to limit how much disk space each user can use on the family computer’s hard drive.

Setup Disk Quotas

In this example I have a family computer with a 500GB hard drive. I have 4 users on that computer. I’m going to setup a disk quota of 100GB per user.

Open Computer in the Start menu.
Right-click the drive you want to configure disk quotas on (C: drive in this example) and then click Properties.
Click the Quota tab.
Click Show Quota Settings.
Check off Enable quota management.
Check off Deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit if you want to strictly enforce the limit. This is optional and not recommended because it can cause data loss and application failures.
Select Limit disk space to and give it an amount. Don’t forget to change KB to GB.
You also need to give Set warning level to a value just under the quota limit.
If you want to be able to tell if people are approaching or exceeding their quotas check off the two log event settings.
Click OK to enable disk quotas on that drive.