Can NFS server limit the amount of disk space that the NFS client can use?

Let's say in a server A with 100GB partition, user create a NFS export directory. In server B, user mount the NFS share to use it.

In server A, can the NFS server limit the amount of disk space that the NFS client can use? Or the client will always be able to use the full disk space available?


  • If you want to limit the amount of disk space each user (or group) is using, then you can set up disk quotas on the NFS server (as mentioned in another answer already). You can easily find tutorials about how to do that. Once disk quotas are enabled, you can set the maximum disk space each user is able to use (the default is not to have any limit, so you will have to explicitly set a disk quota, e.g. with the setquota command, for all the users). You might also want to make sure that the sum of the allocated quotas is smaller or equal to the partition size, to ensure that everybody always has free space.

  • On the other hand, if you want to limit the total disk space used by the NFS share itself, the easiest solution is to put it on a dedicated partition having the size you want—so it is physically impossible that it will take more space than that.


If you set up Quotas in the shared file system (on the server side), the clients can't use more space than the quota set.