Disk Quotas and Free Space

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

Disk quotas are transparent to the user. When a user asks how much space is free on a disk, Windows NT reports only the available quota allowance the user has available. If the user exceeds this allowance, Windows NT returns the same error it would return to indicate that the disk was full.

To obtain more free disk space after exceeding the quota allowance, the user must do one of the following:

• Delete some files.
• Have another user claim ownership of some files.
• Have the administrator increase the quota allowance.

Programs that need to retrieve the actual amount of free disk space can call the GetDiskFreeSpaceEx function and look at the TotalNumberOfFreeBytes parameter.