Google Workspace for Education storage policy changes
support.google.com
support.google.com
From https://support.google.com/a/answer/139019: "Google Workspace for Education does not collect student data for advertising purposes.
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(Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Workspace or Ads - I don't represent these teams.)
That doesn't mean that they don't collect data for other purposes, which include analytics and tracking on how to change the service and said data is still valuable.
* Google Drive unlimited for businesses has shut down.
* Google Drive unlimited for education has shut down.
* Google Drive files are now deleted if you've not accessed your account recently (no definition of recent)
They've been very clear that it's 2 years, and they will notify you before they remove anything.
Ex: see all the Google Photos competitors who are doing the "I told you so" roadshow when they announced the end of unlimited storage for free. Other apps couldn't compete and/or died out, and so with market share in hand Google could "raise" prices.
Further, Google doesn't hide that they want to grow "services" revenue, and had mentioned it in previous investor calls. I'm guessing they're seeing the success Tim Cook has had with diversifying revenue and growing services like crazy, and now they want to leverage that channel for growth.
> Institutions with greater than 20,000 [...] active users [...] will be provided with additional storage.
So >=5GB per user. Not great, not terrible. I guess most students who use their Google student account for educational purposes only don't need more than that.
Might get tricky for teachers and some STEM-students however.
I need to free up space, thanks to the new storage policy. It's kinda hard to track down which directories are using the most data when there is no way to check...
rclone size gdrive_remote:/path/to/folder
I've also had to resort to using rclone for this, which is absurd.
P.S. And don't forget: the data in the Trash folder counts against your quota. So if you use rclone to get folder sizes and start deleting things, you better be sure to empty the trash.
And that gets very difficult if the Trash has a lot of items in it, as the web interface will only delete a limited number of items from the Trash at a time.
As a result, you might also want to use rclone to delete permanently and bypass the Trash entirely.
Once again, while I tend to assume incompetence over malice for most things, in this case, you really gotta wonder...
You can also view objects by the quota they consume at https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota
After 30 days, IIRC. That's not helpful if you're trying to manage quota now, and certainly isn't an excuse for the truly astonishingly bad UX around the trash bin.
> You can also view objects by the quota they consume at https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota
Objects as in individual files. It does not show you which folders are, in aggregate, consuming large amounts of storage. As a result this is utterly useless unless your quota is taken up by a few large objects. I legitimately have no idea what use case they thought they were addressing when they built that view.
There may not be a way to do this yet, but hopefully should be coming someday. One key thing to understand is that Google Drive seems to be implemented as a graph, not a tree. This becomes apparent when you realized that any item (folder or file) could be placed into multiple directories on your drive. This allowed for cycles and lots of other crazy things within the filesystem (as you aren't guaranteed to have a single parent folder).
Now, this behavior finally changed in Sept 2020[1], and they are backfilling all mutli-links to be shortcut (symlink) based. This should finally allow for proper directory navigation and determining size. It also fixes all kinds of other problems that a graph file system causes.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/simplifying-g...
That doesn't prevent a folder size calculation. It does mean you need to do a graph traversal, and you might need to supplement the feature with a visualization akin to what you get from windirstat/baobab/etc, so users know what's factoring into the calculation.
It also likely means this isn't an instantaneous operation, but again, I look at windirstat/baobab as examples for how to present a UX that's workable.
But that doesn't prevent the feature from being built, and the fact that rclone already has it says to me the gdrive team has simply chosen not to make this functionality available.
Given Google's history with UX and support of existing products, the other possibility is the product is simply understaffed/undermaintained and poorly managed. This is the "incompetence" take.
And again, to emphasize: rclone can do this today. Is it a bit slow (and possibly limited)? Absolutely. But it works, and is how I've turned to managing my own gdrive quota since Google seems to be either unwilling or incapable of offering the functionality themselves.
Given that Google does offer you tools for managing your quota, and knowing it's a very difficult problem to solve, I'm disinclined to believe this is malicious or incompetent.
A) Why wasn't proper usage reporting built in from the start? If you are limiting a user by a usage metric, then you should be giving them a way to manage that usage intelligently. It does sound like Drive is a complicated structure, but, well, that's no excuse for not supporting your users properly.
B) I'm not surprised by Google ending the unlimited plan. But I still consider it bait and switch. Promising "unlimited" in the first place is impossible. It's false advertising. All the companies that do, or did, that, really should be fined. At very least we should hit them with a class action.
C) Google's method of ending the unlimited plan is not very good. They really should have done something like:
"We are ending the unlimited plan. New users will receive 100TB. Current users with more than 100TB of data will be granted a perpetual 120% of their current data usage as of last night at midnight UTC. Current users with less than 100TB, will have a 120TB limit."
That would have been far more fair, and much less of a bait and switch.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who replied. The tips about rclone really helped out.
The person running my Plex uses an unlimited Enterprise plan, so this won't stop them.
My last upgrade was to 4TB and I've no doubt my next in a few years will be to 64 (though might be a different technology eg. SSD if the relative economics change).
What ? I know me and my friends alone use 5TB each. And our uni has around 8000 students.
100TB for everyone combined is ridiculously low.
They write some essays, store some PDF's, share some Google Docs documents, use a music streaming service, and don't download YouTube videos.
Seems acceptable for schools to start enforcing acceptable-use policies that exclude using these accounts for anything but schoolwork if it saves money and resources to spend on other things.
Any pointers good sir/mam on how to have their own physical backups? Like NAS and others?
moreover, some youtubers remove their stuff
Why did you think your university account was for "whatever random crap I want to put in it", and also as much data as I could ever want to use"?