Do you use your University Google Drive account (i.e. a Google account accessed through your Raven login, rather than a personal Google account) for backup and storage? If so, there are significant changes coming relating to storage limits — so it’s important that you understand what the changes will involve, and whether there will be any impact on your work.

University Information Services have the details on their website:

Google is withdrawing its G Suite for Education licence that the University has been using for the past 12 years. This licence gave you unlimited storage. It will be replaced by the Google Workspace Education Fundamentals free licence, which doesn’t give users any personal storage quota, and three paid-for upgraded licences that do include limited individual storage quotas.

The University has purchased the premium Google Workspace Education Plus licence. This will give you 20GB personal file storage available to Education users. It will also allow you to use some Google Workspace tools that are currently not available to you.

When will these changes come into effect?

December 2022.

How this might affect you

If you have less than 20GB of data stored on your University Google Drive, you will not be affected.

If you have more than 20GB of data on your University Google Drive, you will be able to access your files after the new limit comes into effect, but you will not be able to modify them or to store more data until you reduce your usage to below 20GB.

What you need to do by December 2022

It will not be possible to purchase additional storage under Google’s Education licences, so you must ensure that your usage is below 20GB if you wish to continue actively using your Google Drive:

1. Review your Google Drive storage usage.
2. If your usage exceeds 20GB, move some data to another service.

Alternatives to Google Drive

University Information Services has noted that some researchers are currently using Google Drive to store large amounts of research data, or as a backup, and advise strongly against doing this. They offer a range of other options for backup and/or storage of research data.

For full details of the changes, how they might affect you, and next steps, please see the University Information Services website.