There is a larger industry trend towards eliminating “unlimited” offerings for cloud-based services. This has its roots in the fact that, unlike 5-10 years ago, storage costs are no longer rapidly decreasing. In fact, they have leveled off or increased in recent years.

1. Our primary goal is to offer our campus community secure and cost effective solutions for storing and preserving the important data that is the lifeblood of the University, while maintaining the abilities of individuals and teams to continue to work productively in service of the University’s teaching, research, and public service missions.
2. We are actively engaged with the Office of the President and other UC campuses to establish a systemwide contract with Google that addresses security and cost concerns.
3. We are taking a comprehensive look at the overall file storage and collaboration strategy for the entire campus. 

UCI Google Workspace is an important part of OIT’s Communication and Collaboration service offerings; any changes within our control will be a part of our ongoing discussions with campus executive leadership about the governance and funding of Google Workspace.

1. Google will eliminate the free and unlimited storage offering that they have provided to the K-12 and higher education community for nearly a decade along with their rebranding from Google G-Suite for Education to Google Workspace Education.
2. They will now offer tiers of free and paid service offerings for education customers.  Basic storage offerings range between 5GB and 20GB per license.
3. None of these new tiers include unlimited storage, and that OIT will have until the end of June 2022 to adjust our services accordingly.

1. To see the breakdown of usage in your Google account, go to https://drive.google.com/settings/storage
2. To see all the files in your Google MyDrive sorted by usage, go to https://drive.google.com/drive/quota

Do

• Clean up. Delete any files, folders, or emails that you are confident you no longer need from Google. If you have records that are required to be retained* but that you do not need to access regularly, we ask that you consider transferring from Google to OneDrive for storage (*refer to UC’s records retention schedule). To get OneDrive, please start by requesting a UCI Office 365 account.
• Review: If you are storing P3 or P4 data, please review the guidelines before moving or deleting.
• Empty your Google Trash: Deleted files in Google are moved to the trash in Google. Just like on your computer, you need to empty the trash in order for the files to be fully deleted. If you don’t need the files there, please empty them.

Don’t Do

• Don’t move to personal storage. Please don’t move your data to a personal Gmail account. We are working to resolve this at the campus level. The OIT team is hard at work in conjunction with the other UC campuses to identify the best options and strategies to address this licensing change.  We will continue to update the campus community with recommendations and support options.