Set Hard Drive Space Limits For Shared Users Using Windows Disk Quota Management

A few days back we showed you how to use windows disk clean up to delete unnecessary system files, temporary internet files and other files that are no longer required by your system.

In today’s tip, we will show you how you can use Windows disk quota management to set hard disk limits for multiple users of your system.

Let’s say you share your computer with multiple family members and have 4 active user accounts on your home computer. Your 10 year old son downloads random movies, videos and computer games from torrent sites which gradually consumes the entire hard drive space. You are looking for a simple way which can prevent other users of your computer from exceeding the disk quota limit in Windows.

You don’t need any disk quota program or software because this can be easily achieved by setting up proper limits in Windows disk quota management. Following are the steps involved.

1. Open Window explorer and go to “My Computer”.

2. Right click the hard drive or partition on which you want to set up disk quotas. Select the “Properties” option

3. In the following window, goto the “Quotas” tab and you will see something like this:

4. Under Disk Quota settings, you can specify a space limit for each user account and also choose whether you want to enable or disable windows disk quota management.

Choose the selection “Enable Disk Quota Management” and also the selection “Deny disk space to users exceeding the quota limit”. Choosing this setting will ensure that no more disk space is provided to other users if they cross the assigned disk quota limit.

5. Next hit “Apply” and then “OK”. You are done setting up disk quota management in Windows7.

Now when other shared users of the same computer try to save videos, documents or other files to the hard drive where disk quota has been assigned, they will fall under the disk quota rule. When they exhaust the disk allocation limit, they will see a warning message that the file cannot be copied because your quota is full.

We have shown the procedure for Window7 but it also works for both Windows Vista and Windows XP.