Google Workspace Storage Purchase
Find answers to important questions about the Google storage changes, such as how to get additional storage beyond your identified Google quota and alternate options.
In June 2022, Google ended the free, unlimited storage for its Workspace for Education service, affecting all UC San Diego campus accounts and Shared Drives. To adapt, the campus is transitioning to a managed storage model. UC San Diego, having committed to Google services for seven years, must reduce its storage usage to the new limits by June 2024.
During this transition, deleting unneeded items will aid in managing the limited storage shared across the campus. This is also a chance to improve how shared data is organized and managed for research, teaching, and administration.
UC San Diego offers both local and cloud-based storage and collaboration solutions. Your local IT support is available to help tailor these solutions to specific needs. Below is an overview of the available campus services.
Storage Purchase Process
Staff and Faculty members can request an increase of their Google account's standard 2GB storage to 100GB. Use this ITS Service Desk request form to upgrade your faculty/staff account to 100GB. Additional storage is only available for purchase after exceeding 100GB. Please note that this license is only offered to Faculty and Staff, it is not for student use.
Departments/divisions/units can purchase additional 10TB blocks of storage, for either individual user accounts or Shared Drives, at an annual rate of$1440.00. This is the current rate offered by Google.
Submit this ITS Service Desk request form to indicate which Google storage option you want to order and be prepared to provide the appropriate funding source information (Project and Task, Split with Percentage).
Option 1: Purchasing storage for an individual account
This is common for situations where your Google email is over or approaching 100GB and you can not delete additional emails. When you make a purchase of storage for an individual account, this will increase your storage quota by the number of 10TB segments you purchase for 1 year. You will get a reminder email to renew (purchase again) after 11 months. Note that your storage quota will be reduced to the standard amount if the renewal is not received.
To make the purchases, open the request form, complete the fields, and submit.
- Perform Single Sign-On login to reach the support portal
- Select the “Google Storage Quota Increase” Request Type
- Click the "Options" link
- Provide storage request description and details
- Select the Google storage option you want
- Enter number of 10 TB segments (total will be calculated)
- Enter Billing Information
- Review the summary of your order
- Click Submit
Option 2: Purchasing storage for Shared Drives
This is common for situations where your MyDrive is over quota. The purchase will result in moving your MyDrive to a Shared Drive (this is easy to do). Shared Drives will be managed within Google Org Units (a kind of container) which most divisions and departments have set up. When additional storage is purchased, it is assigned to the Org Units and flows down to the Shared Drives within them. For Shared Drives to receive this additional storage quota, they need to be placed in these Org Units
If you have questions about this setup for your own department/division/lab, please first reach out to your local IT support teams, as they may already have this set up for you. Otherwise, reach out to the ITS Service Desk and the Messaging and Collaboration Team will work with you on first-time setup.
To make the purchases, open the request form, complete the fields, and submit.
- Perform Single Sign-On login to reach the support portal
- Select the “Google Storage Quota Increase” Request Type
- Click the "Options" link
- Provide storage request description and details
- Select the Google storage option you want
- Enter number of 10 TB segments (total will be calculated)
- Provide Shared Drive ORG unit or other details
- Enter Billing Information
- Review the summary of your order
- Click Submit
Why is this necessary?
UC San Diego is currently using over 8PB of storage. Under the new agreement, this must be reduced to below 1.3PB before July 1, 2024. This is obviously a MASSIVE undertaking. The only good news about this is that most of the storage is being consumed by a very small number of customers on the campus. We have been working with these customers on remediation since the summer and are seeing good gains in storage reduction. Going forward, we will review storage use and quota allocation annually. Any changes will be announced.
The primary objectives of the quotas are:
- Ensure economical use of storage resources
- Affect as few faculty, students, and staff as possible
- Foster fairness and equity in resource allocation
- Allow for adequate storage to accommodate future campus growth
| Current Usage | Storage Quota |
| 0GB - 0.8GB | 2GB |
| 0.9GB - 100GB | 100GB |
Student account quotas
Quotas are in the process of being implemented across the student population. New students will receive a 5GB quota.
Note: Graduate students that are also employed by the university have received the employee quota.
How are my Shared Drives impacted?
New Shared Drives are limited to 1GB in size. These Shared Drives are intended to cover small teams, committees, and discussion threads for no additional charge.
Larger Shared Drives will move into a paid subscription model. See the answer provided below to the question, "What are my options to buy more Google storage?"
What content is affected by the new quota limits and how do I check my current storage?
The new Google limits apply to all content in Google Drive, Gmail, and Photos. That includes native Google documents like Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.
To review how much storage you currently use and delete large or unnecessary files in Drive, go to Drive Storage. Scan for and delete large or duplicate files you may no longer need.
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.
What happens if I exceed my quota?
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.
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.
What are my options to store data outside of Google Workspace?
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. [Note: there will be no changes to our service as we signed a 5-year agreement effective 7/1/23]
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.
Video consumes a lot of space within the Google environment and with these new limits, it's important to free up valuable space there. The alternative is Kaltura, the campus provided solution for video. 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.
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.
If you need additional assistance, contact your divisional IT support team or the ITS Service Desk. Additional consultation is available.
How were these decisions made?
ITS formed a stakeholder committee of departments/divisions that are heavy users of Google Workspace after the announced change. This team worked together to gather current use, use scenarios, and impact of changes on customers, labs, departments, and divisions. ITS brought in experience from Google, other universities, and corporate expertise to look at options for managing this change and the ongoing maintenance. The model that is being deployed was also reviewed and agreed upon by campus leadership.
There is no way to accomplish this massive reduction in storage allotment without impact, but the objective remains to impact as few people as possible. We know that some customers are being impacted heavily and we are committed to providing assistance along the way.
How are other universities managing this change?
The common objective is to make sure that allotted space is aligned equitably in ways that minimize impact. Since most UC San Diego customers are not heavy Google users, we have been able to focus our available storage resources on the customers that really need it.