Assigning disk quotas?

[Kyle]

I am thinking of assigning disk quotas. Trouble is i have already got 500 users home driectories on the server and i have read that if i assign the quotas ow they wil not take into accoutn the current space each individual user is using?

Is this correct and if so how do i get around the situation so i can enable quota s now?

[localzuk]

It depends how you do it. If you use Windows 2003 R2, the 'File Server Resource Manager and Storage Manager' enables you to apply per folder soft or hard quotas. Also, this allows you to have multiple sizes of quota very easily.

[Teth]

2k3 R2 will give you a very easy way to add quotas and they will be retroactive without having to do any messing. The downside to the R2 quotas is that it is very hard to notify users of they're quota status. By default its set up to send e-mail to warn about quotas but not all school are running internal e-mail systems and in those that are how many kids check they're e-mail regularly enough.

The other option is NTFS quota. It is hard to set up. If you want to have differences in quota size between users you have to pick 1 general quota size and then adjust every other user that deviates from that manually. The NTFS quota can also be retroactive but it requires that ownership is properly set to the users who's files you want to have quotas on. It doesn't work ona per forlder basis but rather the whole drive. It will however show they're quota on they're mapped network drive which I find is the best way to notify users.

A best of both worlds approach would be great but sadly MS don't give us that so you'll have to choose.

[alonebfg]

also the bit i like is the dfs and i have tried it out works really well i now have profiles shadowed and my docs so if one of the servers does fall down people still have access to there my docs and profile login even if they dont have access to nothing else and it is all quota

[leon]

I know it's lazy and not cheap but I really like Northern's Quota Server (I think it's about £900 per year). It's a no brainer to setup and affords really fine control. They include all sorts of fancy reporting tools, end user interaction/notification.

It also allows control over file types as per software restriction policies, which is nice.

[Geoff]

Linux (and thus Samba) will allow you to assign disk quotas on a per user or per group basis. If you want a nice pointy-clicky way of setting up a Linux based File Server I'd suggest OpenFiler.