Google Workspace FAQ

There is little noticeable difference between Google Workspace and the commercial apps you can sign up for as an individual. Behind the scenes, there is a substantial difference. The University of California negotiated a system-wide agreement that gives the university administrative and legal ownership of the data within, and ensures UC security requirements are upheld. This means that UC’s Electronic Communications Policy protects your account. Also, UC San Diego Google Workspace accounts are branded with our ucsd.edu domain and users are not presented with advertising.

Gmail and Calendar are provisioned to individual accounts through departmental IT support. If you would like these features, please talk with your department’s IT representative for more information.

Here you can read about Google's overall approach to IT security (PDF). The UC IS-3 Information Security Policy (PDF) and the UC Appendix – Data Security and Privacy establish security requirements that third-party vendors must comply with and provide language that must be incorporated into purchase agreements before signature.

Contact your department IT support staff or refer to our Blink pages for specific applications:

• Drive
• Hangouts
• Groups

You can also find many support documents provided by Google such as these:

• • Google Help Documentation
  • Google Workspace Learning Center
  • Gmail Help Center
  • Google Calendar Help Center
  • Google Drive Training and Help
  • Google Docs Training and Help
  • Google Sites Training and Help

Pooled storage is a single allocation shared across all of UC San Diego. Affected content includes all files and other items in Workspace services such as Google Drive (My Drive and Shared Drives), Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google Photos, etc.

To check your current usage:

• Login to Google Drive with your UC San Diego credentials
  
• On the left side panel, click “Storage”
  
• Your total used storage is displayed alongside with a breakdown of files stored in Google Drive, Gmail, and Photos

To delete your Google Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos files and make space available, move them to the trash and then empty your trash. If you delete, restore, or permanently delete multiple files or folders at once, it might take time for the changes to take effect.

To review and delete large or unnecessary files in shared drives, go to Shared Drives.

If you need to keep any files that don't fit in your campus account, you can export an archive of your Drive, Gmail, and Photos data with Google Takeout. Then delete unneeded files, messages, and attachments and empty your trash to free up storage space. Learn how to download your data into an archive.

Help is available through your divisional IT support team, or the ITS Service Desk.

Find answers to important questions about the Google storage changes, such as how to get additional storage beyond your identified Google quota and alternate storage options.

When storage limits are enforced and a user exceeds their limit, their Google Workspace is impacted. You need to stay under your storage limit for your Drive, Gmail, and Photos data to keep access to these services.

If your account runs out of storage, your account will be “read-only,” and your services will be disrupted in the following ways until you free up more space:

• You can’t upload new files or images to Google Drive.
• You can’t create new files in collaborative content creation apps like Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, and Jamboard.
• Until you reduce storage usage, nobody can edit or copy your affected files or submit forms owned by you.
• You can't back up any photos and videos to Google Photos.
• You can’t record new meetings in Google Meet.
• You can still sign into and access your Google Workspace for Education account, view and download your files, and send and receive emails.

Log in to your UCSD account and use the Google Storage Manager to quickly scan and delete large or duplicate files you may no longer need.

Unnecessary and duplicate Gmail attachments can take up a lot of space. Use this link to view all your attachments greater than 1MB, or greater than 5MB.

Review and delete emails in your Spam folder and empty the Trash can in your Gmail.

Visit takeout.google.com to review your data and package it up for transfer. This process can take several days, so plan ahead if possible.  Also note that this should be used to move personal data from your UCSD Google account into a different account, not to move UCSD data into personal accounts.  

If you need to keep any files that don't fit in your campus account, you can export an archive of your Drive, Gmail, and Photos data with Google Takeout. Then delete unneeded files, messages, and attachments and empty your trash to free up storage space. Learn how to download your data into an archive.

See below for information about additional storage options and requesting it, if needed.

There are both local and cloud-based resources that are well-suited to support a variety of storage and collaboration needs. Please reach out to your divisional IT support resources so they can advise you on use scenarios that match your needs and provide additional assistance and support. Below is general information about campus provided services.

All campus user accounts have access to the web-based Office 365 platform, which is Microsoft's alternative to Google Workspace. It includes not only programs such as Word Online and Excel Online (all with less features than their desktop counterparts), but also Sharepoint and OneDrive for Business. SharePoint is the storage component of Office365. Think of OneDrive for Business as a personal SharePoint site (My Site) for your documents. It provides a storage quota of 5TB per account and has quite similar features to Google Drive. You can store files via a web browser, but also access your OneDrive directly on your desktop. More information is available on Microsoft's OneDrive for Business website or you can log onto OneDrive via https://onedrive.ucsd.edu.

You receive up to 5TB (5000GB!) of storage via OneDrive.  File management is very similar to Google - visit our OneDrive page to log in and get started.

Microsoft's counterpart to Google's Shared Drives is Teams Files, a standard feature SharePoint site included with every Team. By default, each Team is limited to only 100GB in its Files, but we can increase this for individual Teams so just contact the ITS Service Desk with your request.

Have a lot of videos in Google? The alternative is Kaltura, the campus provided solution for video. You can store unlimited video files via our Kaltura MediaSpace service. It is a better place for storing and managing video content on a video hosting platform without having to worry about file size restrictions or storage limits. Tutorials and training sessions are available on the Kaltura page to assist you with adding, editing, and presenting videos, and troubleshooting. Easy upload instructions here, and more info here.

If you are a UC San Diego researcher with questions about alternative storage options, you can contact the Service Desk, Research IT Services (research-it@ucsd.edu or https://research-it.ucsd.edu), or your local/divisional IT office or team for information and guidance about research data storage. As one example solution, Research IT partners with SDSC on a USS brokering program where researchers can purchase Universal Scale Storage (USS) in 25TB sub-allocations.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center also has two relevant storage services. Neither is cheap, but they offer local support and there should be no additional IDC costs.

• SDSC Cloud Storage costs approximately $385 per TB per year and allows for easy online collaboration.
• SDSC Universal Scale Storage costs only $70 per TB per year but requires a 200TB (or $14,000) buy-in and the data is only available on the campus network via the SMB protocol.

Your UC San Diego email and file storage is not intended for personal files and photos. There are several free and paid alternative storage options for your non-coursework files. CNET has a very helpful article with a round-up and pros/cons for several services.