22 September 2023
Google and Microsoft have announced plans to introduce new limits on the amount of data that can be stored in their Google Workspace for Education and Microsoft 365 cloud storage services, Google Drive and OneDrive.
The majority of University accounts are well within Google and Microsoft's new quotas, so we've decided to begin implementing them for new accounts and for accounts that are already using less storage than the quota.
We won’t make any immediate changes to the minority of accounts that exceed the quotas. We'll work with Schools IT Leads to understand the needs of individuals and groups whose usage currently exceeds the quotas, identify suitable services for them and provide guidance on how to migrate to alternative services. We need to ensure the University's overall storage is below Google's new quota for our Google Workspace for Education tenancy by July 2024 to avoid Google switching all of the University's Google Drive accounts to read-only mode.
What is changing?
On Thursday 28 September, we will implement:
- a 500GB quota for new individual and shared Google Drives and existing accounts that are using less than 500GB
- a 1TB OneDrive quota for new Microsoft 365 accounts for staff and students, as well as existing accounts that are currently using less than 1TB
- a 100GB OneDrive quota for all new Microsoft 365 accounts for visitors and guests, as well as existing accounts that are currently using less than 100GB.
We will consider implementing further quota reductions for Google Drive accounts before Google’s July 2024 deadline.
In addition, requests for shared drives must now be made via the request a Google shared drive form on the IT Support Portal.
Find out more about storage options
You can learn about storage services available to you, including OneDrive, SharePoint, Dropbox and Research data storage.
If you have any questions about the changes, please contact our Service Desk.