Google Ends Unlimited Storage
At the end of 2020, Google announced the end of unlimited storage for all educational institutions. Starting in November 2024, Google will enforce storage limits, and the university will be required to reduce its Google Workspace storage consumption.
To learn more, view NC State’s Google Workspace Storage Project web page.
Quotas for campus accounts – August 2023
Quotas on Google Workspace storage will be applied to all accounts effective August 10, 2023. If your account is over the initial quota, you will automatically be provided with a temporary 30% storage increase to ensure you can continue to work without disruption. Implementing storage quotas will help NC State move toward its Google storage reduction goals by 2024. Once a quota is in place, going over it will result in limited functionality of Google Workspaces services. Please see What happens if I go over my Google storage quota? for more information. Please note that NO data will be removed or deleted by OIT on the imposition of the initial quota on August 10, nor are there any plans to unilaterally delete data going forward. This is a user-driven process with quotas in place to guide our organization’s storage usage down.
Storage Quotas
- Faculty & staff – 100 GB
- Students – 15 GB
- Extension Only County Collaborators – 100 GB (UP08)
- Emeritus faculty – 100 GB (UP10)
- “Other” – 5 GB (all other UP classifications such as retirees, vendors)
- Generic accounts – 5 GB
- Shared Drives – 15 GB per shared drive
- Consumer Photo service will be turned OFF for all new accounts or any account that has no consumed photos storage.
Exceptions and Impact
- Exceptions for storage usage will be available.
- Initial quotas will reflect a current user’s storage to ensure that our campus users can continue to work with no impact. IT staff will work with users over the next 12-18 months to reduce storage or consider exceptions.
- Over the next 12 – 18 months, generic accounts will be reviewed to better understand business processes using generics and consider changes to their default quota if necessary.
For information on managing files and understanding quota messages, see our Knowledge Base articles for Google storage.
Additional Storage options
To make appropriate choices on which storage option(s) to use, you need to know your data:
- Understand the data types you are storing, such as videos, photos, or raw data.
- Understand the data sensitivity of your data. See Storage Locations for University Data: By Data Classification.
- Consider the frequency of access.
- Consider the persons needing access.
- Check out our Storage Finder to learn more about possible storage options
Research Storage Options
Start local – check in with your local IT support staff on any options they may have for research storage. Information on central research storage options is below:
- Research Storage service summary/documentation
- Faculty can request up to 40TB of free storage and should consider this option for their research projects. Graduate students working with these faculty can also be given access to this storage space.
- One of the recommendations from the report was to review and improve the usability of OIT’s Research Storage service.
- Available to help users navigate and assess a broad range of possible research solutions as the technological infrastructure required to conduct efficient and secure research becomes increasingly complex.
- The RFS team partners with University and departmental service providers to address research computing and data questions, freeing you to focus on your research.
Try out the Storage Finder, a tool that provides “at a glance” suggested storage locations based on general input from the user or researcher.