Frequently Asked Questions

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

We will be implementing the final storage limits for individual accounts on July 5, 2023. A small portion of account holders who are over the final limit will be granted additional time, until January 23, 2024. 

SPAs and Shared Drives will have changes in 2024, and we'll provide more information as we have it available.

The vast majority of the community will not need to take any action at all! However, If you would like to prepare for lower quotas 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and bMail and delete anything you are comfortable with deleting, especially backups of backups, archives, and extremely out of date records/emails. 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.

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

You will not be able to create new documents or do any activity that adds to your storage consumption. 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. 

We know that SPAs and shared drives will have quotas, but have not determined the date those will be applied or what the quotas will be. We're hoping to announce more details about these quotas in August 2023. We’ll update this website when we have more information.

If you have more than 5 TB of content in your account and you would like to work with a specialist to assess and develop a data plan, please submit a ticket at  https://technology.berkeley.edu/contact-us. We’ll reach out via your ticket to discuss or set up a meeting. If you currently have less than 5 TB of content please don’t take any action at this time. We will contact you with further information in mid-2023.

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 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!

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.

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 will need to take any action.

• 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 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.

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.

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.

Current information: 

The final 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
• January 24, 2024 -  all remaining individual accounts will have a 150 GB limit applied.

Information regarding SPA Drives and Shared drives will be coming soon.

Information from January 25, 2023: All newly created accounts on or after January 25, 2023 will be given a 150 GB quota. Also on January 25, 2023 existing accounts will have higher “containment” quotas applied to provide ample time for their content to be assessed while maintaining day to day operations. These quotas are simply to contain the growth of our Google storage usage on campus. We will be implementing lower quotas later in the project, and we are still determining the final quotas. More specific dates and guidance will be provided closer to the fall semester of 2023.

Containment Quota Structure

Shared Drives

All shared drives have been given a containment quota of 500 GB.

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.