Frequently Asked Questions

Berkeley currently allows alumni to renew the active @berkeley.edu Google account they had as a former student, employee, or participant in a prior Alumni Email Service.  These accounts will be limited in July 2024 to only allow 5 GB of total storage (including all Gmail, Drive & Photos). More information about the limitations to the @berkeley.edu Google accounts provided to alumni can be found at Alumni Email Changes.

No. Email services for alumni are currently funded by UC Berkeley as a privilege and limited benefit to alumni. There are no charges to alumni for using the alumni email service. All UC Berkeley Google accounts provided to alumni will be limited to 5 GB of total storage.

Alumni can not purchase additional storage or use storage purchased directly from Google with their UC Berkeley Google accounts.

1. Enter the email address provided in the To: field of this message to login to Google
2. Enter your CalNet ID and Passphrase when presented with the CalNet Authentication Service page.
   1. The part before the @ symbol in the To: field of this message is your CalNet ID
   2. You can Reset Passphrase(link is external) if you can no longer remember it.
3. Check the Email(link is external) section of your Google profile to see all of your alternate email addresses.

1. Alumni who have an active berkeley.edu email account and an active CalNet ID and passphrase; and/or

2. Recent graduates (whose grace period ended after September 2023) who are alumni or attendees of full-time UC Berkeley undergraduate or graduate degree programs with more than 12 completed course hours.

Many alumni value continued access to their berkeley.edu email address as a way to identify themselves as Berkeley graduates. Communicating between alumni and using it for job searches are two common ways alumni use their accounts.

Things to avoid:

1. Sending unsolicited email (SPAM) - even in relatively small numbers, sending SPAM can get your account blocked by Google.  If your account is blocked, your account will be reviewed for abuse and can be subject to restrictions or revocation.

2. Using as a login to other services - Signing up for and using your @berkeley.edu address for other consumer services should be avoided.  These include, but are not limited to, personal banking/financial accounts and personal subscriptions like Amazon or Netflix.

Please refer to the Alumni Email Service Level Agreement for the exhaustive list of alumni responsibilities including adherence to policies and prohibited conduct

1. Control costs: Berkeley needs to manage the additional costs associated with the new storage pricing model offered to Google Workspace Education customers.

2. Manage risks and threats: Berkeley needs to manage the security and reputational risks and threats posed by unattended and possibly compromised alumni email accounts.

No. Campus is committed to maintaining ways for alumni to stay engaged with Berkeley. We will continue to evaluate whether this service is an effective way of achieving that goal. The Alumni Email Service is provided as a privilege and is subject to additional changes.

Please review Leaving UC Berkeley to take the necessary steps to ensure you have retained any personal information you require and that you have properly transferred any data to others as appropriate.  If you take no action, your account will be disabled and eventually deleted.

No. Only alumni with existing, active @berkeley.edu Google accounts are eligible to renew their service.

No. Only alumni with an active CalNet ID and passphrase can renew an @berkeley.edu Google account.

Yes.  If you already have CalNet 2-Step verification using DUO, you will be required to continue using it.  Alumni who don’t yet have CalNet 2-Step will be contacted in late summer 2024 or early Fall 2024 with instructions on how to set up CalNet 2-Step.

• If there are several files, or you need to keep the URL or sharing settings, you should move them all into a Shared Drive

• If you only need to keep a small number of files and the URLs and sharing don’t matter, You can make a copy of the file then save the copy (e.g. on your MyDrive, a Shared Drive or your computer)

• No content will be deleted prior to September 2024

• More information

No. However, if the student is working on a group project with a Lab or other research group, the faculty member can create the Shared Drive and the team members, including the student, can use it.

https://security.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-box-and-google-data-use-agreement

The vast majority of the community will not need to take any action at all! However, If you would like to prepare for lower storage limits that will be implemented later in the project, you can review your existing content in Google Drive, Google Photos, and bMail and delete anything you are comfortable with deleting, especially backups of backups, archives, and extremely out of date records/emails. Make sure you are staying within compliance requirements for records retention.

This is just a recommendation; you are responsible for determining what content you are willing to delete. For more information please check out our information on what you can do right now.

All remaining individual accounts will have a 150 GB limit applied on January 23, 2024. 

SPAs will need to be within their new limits by June 2024.

Shared Drives will need to be within their new limits by June 2024, or have an Expanded Shared Drive or Pass Through Pay Option agreement in place.

Alumni accounts will have a 5 GB limit applied on July 15, 2024

No, they are attributed to the owner’s account.

SPAs will need to reduce content in their My Drive space to be below 150 GB by June 2024. Shared Drives that do not have a special arrangement in place will also need to be within 150 GB by June 2024.

If your individual account is over the limit on January 23, 2024 you will not be able to edit existing documents or upload new items in Google Drive. Email will work normally. No content will be deleted. Once you remove content so that you are below your quota your account will go back to operating normally. You can find more information about the various storage limit banners and notifications in the Knowledge Base. 

If your department has members whose accounts hold more than 1 TB of data, we have probably already contacted your department. If you’d like us to present the details of the project to your department, just email us at google-storage-project@berkeley.edu. We'd be happy to present the project or provide a workshop for your department to develop a content management strategy.

If you are over quota, some services such as creating a new Google Doc may cease to function, however Gmail will continue to send and receive email normally.

In Gmail, when you attach something to an email, if that item is below 25 MB it stays in Gmail and applies to the Gmail portion of your overall usage. Larger attachments are saved in Google Drive and apply to the Drive portion of your overall usage. In both cases, the usage contributes to your overall quota.

We are happy to consult with you. Please attend one of our open office hours or email us at google-storage-project@berkeley.eduto arrange a personal consultation.

The Google quotas and service changes will apply to all Google account holders at UC Berkeley, including students, faculty, staff, alumni, emeriti, and retirees; however, only a very small number of people are storing content over the new storage limits and will need to take action. Most people are not impacted by these changes.

On a day to day basis, we apply the model of privileged access, meaning we access the minimum of what is necessary in order to perform the requested or required task. We only access an account’s data without permission in very specific and rare cases such as legal holds. In those cases, we never look at the contents, but pull the requested information without further perusal.

The Google services you access at Berkeley will remain available to you, and your account will continue to work as it does now, as long as your account remains under your quota. You will still have access to all the same Google services you use now.

We always make absolutely every effort to communicate when content is at risk of deletion. Sometimes content can be automatically deleted as part of the account lifecycle, where we deactivate and then delete accounts that were used by people no longer affiliated with the university. If an account holder repeatedly ignores our attempt to contact them in order to assist with lowering usage and no engagement or reduction has occurred, we may consider deleting content in that account. It is our goal to never have to delete content on your behalf!

All accounts will be given a storage limit. To find out how much storage you are currently using, go to this URL and log in with your CalNet ID: https://drive.google.com/settings/storage . As we continue to develop the quotas, if you are directly impacted we will email you.

The quota applies to Google Drive, bMail, and Google Photos.

• To see the breakdown of usage in your Google account, go to https://drive.google.com/settings/storage.

• To see all the files in your Google MyDrive sorted by usage, go to https://drive.google.com/drive/quota.

• To find how much you are storing in your Shared Drive go to https://drive.google.com. Expand the “Shared drives” item in the left sidebar. Select the Shared Drive you’re interested in, and then Choose Info (small i in a circle) in the upper right hand corner. The Details information panel will open and you can scroll down to see the storage amount. Read More.

• To see the usage in a SPA, log into Google or Box as that SPA, and then follow the links above.

• Be sure you are logged into your Berkeley Google account, and not a personal Google account. To be sure, you can use a private or incognito browsing window.

Only two percent of the campus population will see any impact based on the implementation of these new quotas. For almost all accounts, you can continue to work normally with Google services. We are actively engaging with account holders with 5 TB or more of content to assess and advise how to proceed. Future quota implementations should also only impact a very small percentage of the campus population and those impacted will be directly contacted via email.

Storage limits will be applied in multiple phases.

• July 5, 2023
  • All newly created individual accounts will have a 50 GB limit applied
  • All individual accounts with 35 GB of content or less will have a 50 GB limit applied.
  • All individual accounts with 36 - 150 GB of content will have a 150 GB extended limit applied.
  • All individual accounts with more than 150 GB of content will maintain their current limit until January 24, 2024

• July 1, 2024 -  all remaining individual accounts will have a 150 GB limit applied.
• July 1, 2024
  • All SPA My Drives must be reduced to 150 GB.
  • All Shared Drives must be reduced to 150 GB or have an Expanded Shared Drive or Pass Through Pay Option agreement in place.
• July 15, 2024
  • All Alumni accounts must be reduced to 5 GB.
  • See Alumni Email Accounts for more information.

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.

These changes from Google overlap with the similar changes Box announced last year, so we are taking a bigger picture look at the overall file storage and collaboration strategy for the entire campus. Our primary goal is to find the most 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 mission.

Google and Box are both part of the campus’ Productivity Suite offering; any changes will be a part of our ongoing discussions with the campus about the governance and funding of Productivity Suite.

Google is eliminating the free and unlimited storage offering that they have provided to the K-12 and higher education community along with their rebranding from Google G Suite for Education to Google Workspace Education. We currently store 11.2 PB of data in our entire Google Workspace enterprise environment, and we will need to reduce our storage to below 2.6 PB or the university will be charged significant fees. We will have until November of 2024 to adjust our services accordingly.

Google

To see the breakdown of usage in your Google account, go to https://drive.google.com/settings/storage

To see all the files in your Google MyDrive sorted by usage, go to https://drive.google.com/drive/quota

Box

To see the usage in your Box account, go to https://berkeley.app.box.com/account, then scroll down to "Account Details" and look for "Storage Used"

Usage by SPAs

To see the usage in a SPA, log into Google or Box as that SPA, and then follow the links above.

Do

1. Clean up: Delete any files, folders or email that you are confident you no longer need from Google and Box. 

2. Empty your Box and Google Trash: Deleted files in Google and Box are moved to the trash in Google and Box

3.  Just like on your computer, you need to empty trash in order for the files to be fully deleted. If you don’t need the files in your Google or Box Trash, please empty it.