Google is Discontinuing Unlimited Storage for All Education Customers

[wall03]

Summary

Google is changing everyone (everyone being Education customers) over to an 100TB pooled storage model

 

Quotes

Quote

We recently announced a new storage model, which provides schools and universities with a baseline of 100 TB of pooled storage shared across all users. The new model provides enough storage for over 100 million documents, 8 million presentations, or 400,000 hours of video. This policy will go into effect across all Google Workspace for Education editions for existing customers in July 2022 and will be effective for new customers signing up in 2022. For details, see the blog announcement.

What does “pooled storage” mean?

Pooled storage is shared storage across all of your users for everything in their accounts, including but not limited to files from Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. For details, go to How Google Workspace storage works.

When will Google be enforcing this new storage policy?

This policy will go into effect across all Google Workspace for Education editions for existing customers in July 2022 and will be effective for new customers signing up in 2022. However, to help you manage this change, we will launch new settings to help you see and manage your organization’s storage usage.

What do I do if I need more storage?

Institutions with greater than 20,000 students, faculty, and staff or 20,000 active users that follow our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy will be provided with additional storage. This process will roll out by the end of 2021.

Quote

Google has traditionally offered unlimited storage to qualifying schools and universities for free. However, as we’ve grown to serve more schools and universities each year, storage consumption has also rapidly accelerated. Storage is not being consumed equitably across —  nor within — institutions, and school leaders often don't have the tools they need to manage this. To support schools into the future and ensure fair distribution of this valuable resource, we will be implementing a new pooled storage model and helping admins and school leaders manage their storage. Nothing is changing today and we expect that more than 99% of institutions will be within the pooled storage provided by the new policy.

 

We’re investing even further in Google Workspace for Education with dozens of new features on the way to support the needs of institutions. For example, saved drafts in Google Forms are coming to Education Fundamentals and Google Meet meeting transcripts are coming to the Teaching and Learning Upgrade. Education Plus will get both these features, as well as Classroom roster syncing. Stay tuned for more news throughout 2021.

 

 

My thoughts

Storage isn't free... but cmon!

 

Sources

1. Read about changes to the storage policy - Google Workspace Admin Help

Google Workspace for Education - The Keyword (blog.google)

[suicidalfranco]

Ah yes, the good ol' bait and switch

Never fails

[CrowTheRobot]

As a school IT technician, this sounds like a fun possible new wrinkle.  I'm now curious how much total space is now being used across my entire district, especially with the majority of our students currently on Chromebooks and soon the rest moving to Chrome tablets...

[bcredeur97]

2 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Sounds reasonable if 99% institutions really are within the pool size (assuming not 100% used).
People are learning the hard way that cloud = postponing issues. 

how long before "on prem is the future" again? Lol

it's like a cycle

[AndreiArgeanu]

100TB is both a lot and a little depending on the size of the institution, though it doesn't seem comparable to Microsoft considering that I currently have 1TB of cloud storage that comes with the Office 365 account I have at the college.

[TargetDron3]

2 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

how long before "on prem is the future" again? Lol

it's like a cycle

It is, companies run great rates to get you locked in, then each renewal cost more and more.  But what are you going to do? Pay the slightly higher cost or pay a lot up front to move and risk data loss? 

[JLO64]

Honestly I’m not surprised that they’re doing this. I had a friend back in high school who uploaded 100GB+ of Blu-ray rips to their school Google account since it had unlimited storage.

 

That being said, for a college of around 50,000 students and faculty this equates to roughly 2GB per user... I seriously don’t get why they’re allocating space for all users instead doing it per user.

[Dabombinable]

And my old high school still just does things the old fashioned way - their own dedicated server with proper tape backup. With a server setup exclusively for the 2-3 rooms that have (or had when I was there) iMacs and Macbooks (good old Leopard + Core 2 Duo).

[Fnige]

1 hour ago, JLO64 said:

Honestly I’m not surprised that they’re doing this. I had a friend back in high school who uploaded 100GB+ of Blu-ray rips to their school Google account since it had unlimited storage.

 

That being said, for a college of around 50,000 students and faculty this equates to roughly 2GB per user... I seriously don’t get why they’re allocating space for all users instead doing it per user.

 

3 hours ago, wall03 said:

Institutions with greater than 20,000 students, faculty, and staff or 20,000 active users

 

5GB per user

[Brooksie359]

1 hour ago, JLO64 said:

Honestly I’m not surprised that they’re doing this. I had a friend back in high school who uploaded 100GB+ of Blu-ray rips to their school Google account since it had unlimited storage.

 

That being said, for a college of around 50,000 students and faculty this equates to roughly 2GB per user... I seriously don’t get why they’re allocating space for all users instead doing it per user.

The problem with per user is that obviously some people depending on their position in the institution might require more storage. Also depending on what sort of things you work on. I had tons of 3d modeling stuff on my student account back in the day for school projects while I doubt a business major would have much more than documents and presentations. Obviously I would require more storage than a business major but less than someone like a professor. At the end of the day it is easier for them to just pool it all together than try to allocate it per person. 

[JamesTheFolf]

3 hours ago, wall03 said:

Summary

Google is discontinuing unlimited storage for all education customers

 

Quotes

 

 

My thoughts

Storage isn't free... but cmon!

 

Sources

1. Read about changes to the storage policy - Google Workspace Admin Help

Google Workspace for Education - The Keyword (blog.google)

Bruh that's gonna suck a lot. And their line about this not going to affect a lot of organizations is total BS. On my google drive for schools I have almost 50GB of data, and we have 17k students, and 1.5k teachers. This is gonna be a big change especially to big organizations. They've been cutting storage for awhile now. First unlimited google photos, things in google drives trash get deleted after 30 days, and now this. Google must really be struggling to keep up with their storage demands.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, wall03 said:

We recently announced a new storage model, which provides schools and universities with a baseline of 100 TB of pooled storage shared across all users.

LOL! We have singular network shares larger than 100TB, totally useless.

[Fnige]

1 hour ago, jrhaberland said:

I have almost 50GB of data, and we have 17k students, and 1.5k teachers

Fuck thats a lot of students.

[JamesTheFolf]

53 minutes ago, SlimyPython said:

Fuck thats a lot of students.

Not really lol, that's just a K-12 school system. Imagine how college are going to be with over 30k students, not including graduate students or faculty.

[JamesTheFolf]

Also this is so ironic because google used to offer unlimited google drive storage with an enterprise account. However now the most you can get now is 5TB per user unless you Contact them and you specifically ask for it. See here: https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html

 

Reminds me of this project LTT did a few years ago:

 

[Arika]

unsurprising. there is no such thing as unlimited when you're talking about a service provider.

 

Partly because of my internet, but this is why i dont store anything in the cloud, i want to control my own data as much as possible, all my backups are local.

[captain_to_fire]

Looks like I still have it, not sure how long it’s gonna last but I’m fine if they capped it at 100 TB as pooled storage. 

[Fnige]

2 hours ago, jrhaberland said:

Not really lol, that's just a K-12 school system. Imagine how college are going to be with over 30k students, not including graduate students or faculty.

K-9 I used to go to had something like 1.2k - 2k students. Over here, if you go further out. Theres schools with barely any students, friend used to go to one im sure

[JamesTheFolf]

1 minute ago, SlimyPython said:

K-9 I used to go to had something like 1.2k - 2k students. Over here, if you go further out. Theres schools with barely any students, friend used to go to one im sure

Yeah I'm from a pretty big school system, but it's around the average for where I live.

 

10 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Looks like I still have it, not sure how long it’s gonna last but I’m fine if they capped it at 100 TB as pooled storage. 

Well it's not you that's capped at 100TB it is the total amount of data from everyone in your organization combined.

[CT854]

33.4k students at the institution where I'm a grad student and 4.4k in academic staff, which almost certainly doesn't include support and technical staff that also have .edu emails.

 

Not world-ending for me personally, but not fun either.  I'm sure this is gonna screw with at least one sector of the university.

 

8 hours ago, wall03 said:

Google has traditionally offered unlimited storage to qualifying schools and universities for free. However, as we’ve grown to serve more schools and universities each year, storage consumption has also rapidly accelerated. Storage is not being consumed equitably across —  nor within — institutions, and school leaders often don't have the tools they need to manage this. To support schools into the future and ensure fair distribution of this valuable resource, we will be implementing a new pooled storage model and helping admins and school leaders manage their storage. Nothing is changing today and we expect that more than 99% of institutions will be within the pooled storage provided by the new policy.

Okay, sure -- storage isn't free, and offering unlimited storage probably wasn't sustainable anyway.  But using this vague reasoning as a cover by saying they're doing people a favor by nixing their storage capacity just comes across to me as disingenuous.  Just say that storage doesn't grow on trees and move on.

 

[JamesTheFolf]

7 minutes ago, CT854 said:

Okay, sure -- storage isn't free, and offering unlimited storage probably wasn't sustainable anyway.  But using this vague reasoning as a cover by saying they're doing people a favor by nixing their storage capacity just comes across to me as disingenuous.  Just say that storage doesn't grow on trees and move on.

Yeah they have been cutting back on their storage a lot recently, wouldn't be surprised if something else gets cut soon.

 

Wouldn't be surprised if they started to put more limits on Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Sites

[LogicalDrm]

@wall03, your opener here is lacking personal input required for Tech News posts. Please fix;

Quote

Your thread must include some original input to tell the reader why it is relevant to them, and what your personal opinion on the topic is. This needs to be MORE than just a quick, single comment to meet the posting guidelines.

If not corrected, this thread will be moved to another, suitable subforum, probably to Software.

[Sauron]

13 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Sounds reasonable if 99% institutions really are within the pool size (assuming not 100% used).
People are learning the hard way that cloud = postponing issues. 

If 99% of institutions don't use more than this why limit it in the first place?

4 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Reality of it is that they already have more than enough data to do whatever they need to. Providing more "free" storage is just lost revenue.

So I guess they should just provide the minimum service possible because more would be "lost revenue"? These are already PAYING CUSTOMERS by the way. As far as I can tell you don't get any discount if you are an institution that doesn't meet the requirements for them to give you more storage.

[GDRRiley]

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

LOL! We have singular network shares larger than 100TB, totally useless.

20,000 people sharing 100tb hmm thats .2gb per users, which is more than my school gives for our onsite storage at 100mb per student which is useless.

 

[RejZoR]

This is why I always call BS on "Unlimited" claims. It's never unlimited. There are always some hidden limitations and if there really aren't, you can be assured whoever is offering it will soon be sacked. Like evident by Google so many times.

 

Only thing I've ever seen to be truly unlimited in my entire life is bandwidth of my ISP. In can run my connection 24/7 at its peak speeds and it'll never get throttled, limited or otherwise impaired. And it has been this way for many many years ever since I signed up for service. It's nice to see someone actually delivering the "unlimited" as promised.