10-43LESSON 3 MANAGING DISK QUOTASHOW TO DETERMINE THE STATUS OF DISK...

10-43Lesson 3 Managing Disk Quotas

How to Determine the Status of Disk Quotas

You can determine the status of disk quotas in the Properties dialog box for a disk by

checking status message to the right of the traffic light icon (refer to Figure 10-18). The

color shown on the traffic light icon indicates the status of disk quotas as follows:

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A red traffic light indicates that disk quotas are disabled.

■

A yellow traffic light indicates that Windows XP Professional is rebuilding disk

quota information.

■

A green traffic light indicates that the disk quota system is active.

How to Monitor Disk Quotas

You use the Quota Entries For dialog box (refer to Figure 10-19) to monitor usage for

all users who have copied, saved, or taken ownership of files and folders on the vol-

ume. Windows XP Professional scans the volume and monitors the amount of disk

space in use by each user. Use the Quota Entries For dialog box to view the following:

■

The amount of hard disk space that each user uses

■

Users who are over their quota warning threshold, signified by a yellow triangle

■

Users who are over their quota limit, signified by a red circle

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The warning threshold and the disk quota limit for each user

Guidelines for Using Disk Quotas

Use the following guidelines for using disk quotas:

■

If you enable disk quota settings on the volume where Windows XP Professional

is installed, and your user account has a disk quota limit, log on as Administrator

to install additional Windows XP Professional components and applications. In

this way, Windows XP Professional will not charge the disk space that you use to

install applications against the disk quota allowance for your user account.

■

You can monitor hard disk usage and generate hard disk usage information with-

out preventing users from saving data. To do so, clear the Deny Disk Space To

Users Exceeding Quota Limit check box when you enable disk quotas.

■

Set more-restrictive default limits for all user accounts, and then modify the limits

to allow more disk space to users who work with large files.

■

If multiple users share computers running Windows XP Professional, set disk

quota limits on computer volumes so that disk space is shared by all users who

share the computer.

■

Generally, you should set disk quotas on shared volumes to limit storage for users.

Set disk quotas on public folders and network servers to ensure that users share

hard disk space appropriately. When storage resources are scarce, you might want

to set disk quotas on all shared hard disk space.

■

Delete disk quota entries for users who no longer store files on a volume. You can

delete quota entries for a user account only after all files that the user owns have

been removed from the volume or after another user has taken ownership of the

files.

Practice: Managing Disk Quotas

In this practice, you configure default quota management settings to limit the amount

of data users can store on drive C (their hard disk drive). Next, you configure a custom

quota setting for a user account. You increase the amount of data the user can store on

drive C to 10 MB with a warning level set to 6 MB. Finally, you turn off quota manage-

ment for drive C.

!

Note If you did not install Windows XP Professional on drive C, substitute the NTFS parti-

tion on which you did install Windows XP Professional whenever drive C is referred to in the

practice.