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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

This suggests Google is putting 100TB as being enough for 20,000 users.

Thats an average of 5 Gigs/user.

I suspect nearly all schools and universities are within that today. Remember there will be a lot of people who barely use their Google account and just have a few text emails in it.

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This will definitely hit the schools that bought into Google the hardest.

The district that I grew up in is very tech-heavy– all middle school students get a Chromebook which is then upgraded to a Windows laptop for high school. Chromebooks naturally try to drive you towards storing everything in Google Drive (student devices, if I'm remembering correctly, are configured with about 16GB of storage, maybe less). That will drive up storage use.

Most assignments are delivered and submitted electronically. This uses up storage, especially since Google removed the free-ness aspect from Google Docs and its companion services.

The real "meat" comes from things like video projects, which were a yearly at minimum occurrence. These were usually stored in Google Drive and submitted via Classroom.

To clarify, I don't think it's wrong to charge for your services, especially at a paltry $5/student/yr for an additional 15GB/user. What I do think is wrong is pushing your product with manipulative tactics (making everything free) then suddenly flipping the switch and making everything cost money once everyone's bought in.

What's wrong with the people getting the most benefit paying a little more? They aren't paying for a dozen other vendors to fill in the gaps for things they go all in for.

You can delete old video if you want.

What kind of content do you actually need to store as a student on cloud that takes substantial storage? Genuine question. I used dropbox free tier with 2 GBs throughout all of undergrad + masters + phd, and I never had problems. Lecture videos are hosted online. Data dumps from experiments sure as hell don't go on random cloud storage but appropriate networked storage.

Obviously I was not using it to dump large amounts of raw data, but normal student stuff like problem sheets, paper submissions, reading material.

The people using this as their personal backup for their movie collections are the problem - they are abusing an education service for their personal use. It's why we cant have nice things.

We have nice things. We have 100T of storage per customer.

That's a third of what a free personal Google account would get. I think emails alone would equal that for many faculty/staff, especially if you "archive" everything and only delete spam.

I agree that there will be a lot of people who minimally use the services, but email would likely be the highest space waster. Tons of people across the domain getting the same HTML-heavy newsletters, transactional emails, etc, would add up to a lot. Plain text emails are rare these days.

The average across a school is a third of the maximum of a free account. I bet the average across all gmail users is less than a third of the limit too.

Just like with internet or other storage platforms, 99% of users are trivial amounts of usage. It's the 1% that use more than the 99% combined that are the problem.

And at a school or university it's easy for the admin to simply add quotas that say "If you use more than 100 gigs, we will deactivate your account".

Having worked there before, yes it's easy to do that to students. Admin staff and (tenured) faculty, less so.

I never had anyone tell me that I had to offer special dispensation to tenured professors when I was the sysadmin of shared services at a university. They get what they get!

Also I kinda feel like a university probably won't use the free tier of Google storage. I imagine they'd go for the $5/year plan that includes 20GB of additional quota per account.

I wish I had worked at your university :D Politics were getting in the way of sane policies all the time.

Fair point on the free tier, though it depends on how valuable they think the IT department is (see above) and yearly budget, etc.

"IT offers 20 GB per professor normally. We can increase yours to 40 GB on request, or more if your department can make a contribution to the running costs."

Having pooled storage of 100TB per customer seems to handle that distribution far better than enforcing a different quota such as 5GB per account.

Also for $5 per student per year among other features you get an additional 20GB of storage per account.

my university google photos alone is 50 times that...

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