Set and manage disk quotas in Windows 11

Stefan
Set and manage disk quotas in Windows 11

If you work with multiple user accounts on one computer, it may be recommended to set a disk quota for users.

By setting a quota for user account it is not possible for these users to consume more than the set quota disk space.

By setting a disk quota, you as the PC administrator have more control over the total disk space by assigning a limit to each user account.

In Windows 11, you can enable disk quota through the settings and assign the share to user accounts active on the PC. To use a disk quota, the Hard Drive to be formatted with it NTFS file system. Any other file system such as exFAT or FAT32 do not support disk quotas.

Set and manage disk quotas in Windows 11

Enable disk quotas

You can set a disk quota via Windows Explorer. Open Windows Explorer. Then click on “This PC” on the left and then right-click on the primary drive (usually the C drive).

Then click on Properties in the menu and click on the “Quota” tab.

In this Hard Drive limits are set for each user, so that one user cannot fill the entire drive. Click “Show quota settings” to view these limits.

Show quota settings

Enable the “Enable quota management” option to use a disk quota. Once you have enabled this option you can configure it.

Manage disk quotas

For example, you can enable the “Deny disk space to users over quota limit” option to set a quota limit. After this, you can set no or maximum disk space for each user. Below you can see an example.

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If you wish, you can include some more events in the quota log by enabling the options. Once you have set everything, click apply. You will then receive the message:

Enable the quota system only if you want to use quota on this disk volume. If you enable the quota system, the volume is rechecked to update disk usage statistics. This may take several minutes.

Enable quota management

It is good to know that a disk quota must be set per disk. So you have multiple disks with different drive letters, then repeat this process.

If you would like to view the quota statistics per usage, click on the “Quota Entries” button in the quota settings. Here you will see a list of all user accounts on the PC.

You can see the status of the quota, the user account name, the account login name, the amount of disk space used, the quota limit set, the alert level, and the percentage of quota used.

Quota entries

I hope this helped you. Thank you for reading!


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