Google Workspace Storage Changes

Earlier this year, Google announced changes coming to education customers regarding their storage policy for the Google Workspace for Education product line. 

Historically, Google has provided unlimited storage at no cost to its education customers, however Google is no longer able to sustain this feature as a result of the increasing usage of Google cloud storage. The greatest impact will be that Google will no longer provide unlimited storage space to schools and universities. Instead, pooled cloud storage will be shared across all users within each institution.

As a result of this policy change implemented by Google, TCNJ is now tasked with the need to reduce the overall storage usage within the TCNJ.edu domain. This includes: 

• Gmail
• Google Drive (My Drive)
• Shared Drives
• Google Photos

The TCNJ Information Technology department is working to make this transition as smooth as possible and understands the significant impact this change by Google will have on students, faculty, and staff. Google has ensured us that they will have the tools and necessary resources provided to us to help meet our July 2023 consumption reduction deadline. 

IT will be contacting users within our domain that currently utilize significantly more storage than average in order to understand their use case and work with them to reduce their storage consumption and identify other possible solutions. 
To view how much storage you’re using with your TCNJ Google account, you can navigate to https://drive.google.com/settings/storage. 

*Discontinued students, who are those that attended TCNJ, but never resumed classes and graduated for 2+ years (5+ for graduate students), will lose both Gmail and Google Drive access on 7/21/2024. Monthly emails have been sent out to them starting on 2/12/24.

Following this date, Discontinued Student status will be determined by Records & Registration based on the following:

• Notifying Records & Registration that you are completely withdrawing (immediate)
• Undergraduate: No attendance for 2 years
• Graduate: No attendance for 5 years

While your account remains over the quota, your ability to send and receive email will not be impacted, however items such as the following will be impacted:

• Saving to Google Drive
• Creating & Editing documents
• Downloading & Saving attachments from email to Drive 

To view how much storage you are using with your TCNJ Google account, please visit : https://drive.google.com/settings/storage. 

IT will continue to inform the campus community about any updates to this project and is always available to answer any questions. To find out ways to reduce your overall storage usage, please check out this Knowledge Base article.

IT has now enabled Google Takeout for all users to help with reducing the amount of used storage. To learn more abut this service, check out our Knowledge Base article on it here.

Updates

Update - 7/13/2022: Google has clarified that Shared Drive data will count towards an organization's overall storage quota.