In April, we announced Google’s decision to end unlimited storage in Workspace (Gmail, Google Drive, etc.) for the education sector. As a reminder, though 90% of users do not exceed the new established limit, as a whole, UCI must work together to reduce storage by July 1, 2024 or face an interruption of service across all Google Workspace tools.

Soft Limits Are Here 

• OIT is sending biweekly notifications to individual accounts who are above their limit.  If you receive a notification, we encourage you to explore campus no- and low-cost alternatives such as OneDrive.

• Account holders with Active Directory credentials can view their assigned tier and storage used for their individual accounts, sponsored accounts and shared drives managed in this report (log in with ucinetid@ad.uci.edu to view).  We expect to provide access to everyone within the next 45 days.

Hard Limits Are Coming

• We are progressively turning on storage limits for accounts and shared drives currently using less than their legacy tier.
  
• We expect to turn on storage limits for accounts and shared drives over their limits starting in December 2023.
  
• We will be sending out a survey to account holders over their limits so we can best prioritize how to help.

Alternatives

• We have published a self-service migration guide to OneDrive using Google Takeout and are developing instructions to move your email account to Exchange Online with Thunderbird or Outlook.

• We’re excited to announce that RCIC’s lab storage backup solution is in alpha testing. Please email hpc-support@uci.edu for more information and to get on their interest list.
  
• We are testing a migration of research workflow infrastructure into Microsoft Sharepoint that preserves embedded links.  We expect to have more results to share in the next 2-4 weeks.

Shared Drives

• We will begin sending biweekly notifications to shared drive managers if their drives are above their limit.
  
• Many shared drives do not identify a single owner who can make decisions for the drive.  We will be sending out emails requesting a UCI account owner.  Shared drives without an @uci.edu account owner will be disabled and deleted.

Inactive Accounts

• We will be disabling employee, group and guest accounts that have not logged in for more than two years. If not claimed, they will be deleted later this year.
  
• Alumni and retiree accounts that have not logged in for more than 180 days will have their mail delivery points changed to Microsoft 365 and their Google Workspace accounts deleted.

To aid in this process, the Google Workspace Storage Changes project page has additional information regarding the new tiers, alternative, shared drives, project timeline and more.

Over the last three months, storage growth in Google Workspace has flattened as many of you have started cleaning up your account and moving your data to other campus-approved alternatives. As more of the campus community follows your lead, OIT is confident we will reach our target to keep Google Workspace working for us all on July 1, 2024.

If you have any questions, please email oit@uci.edu or call the Help Desk at (949) 824-2222.  Due to the expected number of inquiries, we will be prioritizing our responses to those with accounts currently exceeding their limits. Thank you in advance for your understanding and patience.