User-level Administration of Disk Quotas

Disk quotas are transparent to the user. When a user asks how much space is free on a disk, the system reports only the available quota allowance the user has available. If the user exceeds this allowance, the system returns the ERROR_DISK_FULL error, just as it would 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.