Disk Space quota is one of the best features provided by Microsoft! As a System Administrator in any company, you’re always worried about the storage requirements of clients. But employees working in company don’t need the amount of storage they have at their home. That’s mainly because, on their system they keep data related to their work only. If a user uses around 300GB of space at his home, doesn’t mean he will need 300GB of space at work. In enterprise work they don’t need that amount of storage. So
So the administrator can create a shared folder for all the employees and live happily! Right? No!
For most of the employees 4-5GB is enough. Because they won’t keep videos, musics, pictures in our office systems.
But it may happen that 3 or 4 users will use this space as their own and fill it with their personal stuffs, making the file server crash or using up all the space leaving nothing for others.
To stop this we need Disk Quota. Quota has a limiting factor. That is it decides how much data user will have on a network share.
Admin can create a shared folder for each user or a group of users and set a maximum limit of ‘n’ gigabytes. This is useful when a lot of employees working. Along with managing these users in group, you can create a quota and set limit to all the users thus keeping your shared folder safe and in limit.
While setting up Quota, you’ll get two options:
- Hard Limit: When user hits limit, no more space.
- Soft Limit: When user hits limit, he can exceed it but user will be getting notifications giving warnings. This is usually good for the C-level Executives, the ones whom you can’t tell what to do.
If some CEO hit the limits, you as a System Administrator can’t go and tell him to delete their stuffs. When you apply Soft Limit to C level executives, alerts and warnings will be generated and sent to them warning that they are using more than the quota.
So now either they will have to delete their stuffs or increase the budget for extra storage space.
As an admin you can also let know the user if he/she uses a certain amount of the quota.If user is reaching near his limits say 80%, a mail will be sent as notification, warning that he has only 20% left. There are various ways to customize the notifications. As an Admin, you can add a CC or BCC to the e-mail and send to your superior, or run a specific command when the limit is reached.
This Disk Quota Space comes very handy when you’re working with thousands of users and have a common shared folder for all of them. To learn how to set a Disk Space Quota in Server 2012, check this post.