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IT Labs Student Profile Quotas

What is a personal profile?

Your personal profile stores your individual settings in Windows. This includes things like your wallpaper and desktop, your My Documents folder and applications settings.

How does the profile work?

Your profile is stored on a central server and is downloaded at every login and uploaded at every logout. Your profile provides a way of customizing your settings so that your personal settings are the same no matter what Windows computer you log into.

Any change you make to your profile when logged in is not saved to the central server until you log out. This is why you should never store important files or documents in your profile (i.e. on your desktop or My Documents). You should store these in your "Y:" drive, where they are immediately saved.

What is my profile quota?

Each IT Labs user has a soft profile quota limit of 50 MB. Setting a quota limit helps prevent file corruption and speeds up the login process. Users exceeding this quota will see a nag screen, receive a warning by e-mail to their IT Labs e-mail account, and may, after repeated warnings, have their accounts temporarily closed.

What do I do if I go over quota?

1. The first thing that you need to do is figure out what is taking up the most space in your profile.
   To do this:
   1. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\
   2. Right click on your username and choose "Properties" from the context menu.
   3. Next, click on the "Size" tab.
   
   
   
   If the Size tab is not displayed on the computer that you are using, please e-mail and someone will fix the problem. Please be sure to include the hostname of the machine you are using.
2. Once you know what is taking up the most space in your profile, you will need to move this data to either your "Y:" drive, some form of removable storage, or delete the data from your profile.

I can’t find the folder in my profile that is listed as taking up the most space. What should I do?

By default, the windows file manager is set to not show hidden folders or files. You can change this by doing the following:

1. Double click on the "My Computer" icon on the desktop.
2. Select Tools->Folder Options from the menu bar at the top of the "My Computer" window.
3. Click on the "View" tab and put a mark next to the "Show hidden files and folders" option.
4. Click the "Apply" button and then click "OK."