Setting a ZFS Dataset and User Disk Quota

In ZFS we can manage disk quotas via two methods:

• User ID Quota Limits
• Dataset Quota Limits

User Quota Limiting #

We can enforce a blanket limit that automatically applies to every user who writes to the dataset, either via default settings or specific per-user overrides:

Setting the Default User Quotas #

To set the default userspace quota:

zfs set defaultuserquota=10G zpool/some_dataset

To get the value we can simply do the same command replacing set with get and removing the parameter value.

zfs get defaultuserquota zpool/some_dataset

Setting a specific User Quota #

To set a quota for a specific user we may use:

zfs set userquota@username=5G zpool/some_dataset

To remove it we can use:

zfs set userquota@username=none zpool/some_dataset

Dataset Quota Limiting #

To enforce a quota to an entire dataset use the following command:

# Execute with sudo if not root
zfs set quota=10G zpool/some_dataset

To get the quota value set (if any), use:

zfs get quota zpool/some_dataset

We can also enforce only limits on the data within the directory and ignore snapshots from the storage calculations:

zfs set refquota=20G zpool/some_dataset