How default quotas work

You use default quotas to apply a quota to all instances of a given quota type. For example, a default user quota affects all users on the system for the specified volume. In addition, default quotas enable you to modify your quotas easily.

You can use default quotas to automatically apply a limit to a large set of quota targets without typing multiple entries in the quotas file. For example, if you want to limit most users to 10 GB of disk space, you can specify a default user quota of 10 GB of disk space instead of creating an entry in the /etc/quotas file for each user. If you have specific users for which you want to apply a different limit, you can create explicit quotas for those users. (Explicit quotas override default quotas.)

Data ONTAP tracks disk and file usage for quota targets of derived quotas, which means you can change the specifications of these derived quotas without having to perform a full quota reinitialization.

Default quotas can be applied to all three types of quota target (users, groups, qtrees).

Note: When a default user quota is in effect, Data ONTAP also tracks resource usage for the root user and the BUILTIN\Administrators group. Similarly, when a default group quota is in effect, Data ONTAP tracks resource usage for the group with GID 0.

Default user quota example

The following quotas file uses a default user quota to apply a 50-MB limit on each user for vol1:

#Quota target type           disk  files  thold  sdisk  sfile
#-----------  ----           ----  -----  -----  -----  -----
*             user@/vol/vol1  50M

If any user on the system enters a command (for example, writing to a file from an editor) that would cause that user's data to take up more than 50 MB in vol1, the command fails.

Parent topic: Special kinds of quotas