Google Storage Quotas FAQ

All employee and student accounts on or after January 5, 2024, were given a 20 GB quota.  Affiliate and functional accounts were given a 10 GB quota.

A very small number of existing accounts (0.0064%) had higher containment quotas applied to provide enough time for the content to be assessed while maintaining day to day operations.

The quota applies to Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos.

To see the breakdown of usage in your Google account, go to https://drive.google.com/settings/storage

To see all the files in your Google My Drive sorted by usage, go to https://drive.google.com/drive/quota

Make sure you are logged into your UCSB Connect Google account and not a personal Google account.  To be sure, you can use a private or incognito browsing window.

Yes, all Google accounts are affected by the new storage quotas.  All accounts holders are responsible for removing data that is not actively being used for collaboration to keep their storage level below their quota.  Account holder with a business use-case to have a higher storage level need to consider other alternative: https://rcd.ucsb.edu/data-storage-finder

The storage quotas and service changes will apply to all Connect Google account holders at UCSB including students, faculty, staff, affiliates, and functional accounts; however, only a very small number of people will need to take any action.

You will see a yellow warning banner in Drive when you reach 80% of your storage quota.  Click "Manage Storage" to begin cleaning up your files.

You will not be able to create new documents or do any activity that adds to your storage level.

1. You can remove content so you are below your storage quota and you will resume operating as usual.
2. You can contact the Connect Support team to request an increase in quota but exceptions are extremely rare.  The business use-case must meet the highest of criteria.

We make absolutely every effort to communicate when content is at risk of deletion.  Sometimes content can be automatically deleted as part of the account lifecycle, when accounts used by people no longer affiliated with the university are deactivated and deleted.

If you are over quota, we have no plans to delete your content on your behalf.

Remember to empty your Trash and refresh your browser.

You should prepare by reviewing your existing content in Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail.  You can then remove data, particularly backups of backups, archives, and extremely out of date records/emails.

This is just a recommendation; you are responsible for determining what content you are willing to delete.

If you’d like us to present the details of the project to your department, please contact the Connect team.

You can move files and folders from My Drive to a Shared Drive.  You can only move files and folders you own.

Here are the steps:  Move files & folders into shared drives

No.  Shared Drives are separate from My Drives and new shared drives will have a 50GB default storage quota.  Existing Shared Drives should limit their storage levels accordingly and any exceeding the 50GB default quota will be exempted.

We are working with departments to develop and publish a best practices guide for storage.  This initial list is being updated when possible:  https://rcd.ucsb.edu/data-storage-finder

For functional accounts, yes.  This is not possible for employees and affiliates.

Submit a Connect Email Question ticket to request a full report of functional accounts for your department(s).

Yes, Identity netID functional accounts are treated the same as individual accounts with a 20GB default quota.

Functional accounts will not be deleted.

Yes.  All accounts including functional accounts will have a defined lifecycle.

The policies apply to all accounts.  Existing accounts will be exempted except those exceeding 400 GB.  Delegation of that type of functional account works well for email.

From a file storage perspective, a Shared Drive may make more sense.

If you are over quota, some services such as creating or editing Google Drive files will cease to function.  However, Gmail will continue to send and receive email as usual.

In Gmail, when you attach a file to an email, if that item is below 25 MB, it remains in Gmail and applies to the Gmail portion of your overall storage usage.  Larger attachments greater than 25 MB are saved in Google Drive and apply to the Drive portion of your overall storage usage.

In both cases, the usage contributes to your overall quota.

Yes, archived emails count towards storage quotas.

No, files shared with you are attributed to the owner’s storage quota.  Ownership of files can be determined by using the Owner operator in the Drive search bar as such:

owner:netID@ucsb.edu (e.g., owner:janegaucho@ucsb.edu)

Files greater than 25 MB are emailed as Google Drive links and are still stored on your Drive so they count towards your storage quota.

We are not instructing people to delete email.  The storage constraint is being driven by Drive usage.

However, if you have a large amount of storage in Gmail, you might want to consider deleting old emails, as needed.  Keep in mind, emails in your Trash count towards your storage.

Orphaned files are files that have lost their parent folder.  You can use the advanced search in My drive by entering "is:unorganized owner:me" into the search field.  You can either move the files to an existing folder or delete them if they are no longer needed. These files do count against your storage quota.

If it returns no results, you have no orphaned files.

If the document was created on the person's My Drive, then yes, the original file will be deleted along with the account.  Accounts the file was shared with will see a label on the file in their My Drive.  They can then make a copy of the file in their own My Drive.  They can also download the file and upload it to their My Drive.

Accounts will be deleted which will eliminate vacation responders after a fixed time.  We are currently planning to deprovision accounts 6 months after separation.

Employees should prepare their Connect account prior to becoming separated from campus.  However, they will have a 7 day grace period before their account is locked.