How Much Storage is Your District Using?

Unlimited Storage in Google Workspace for Education is ending July 1, 2022. Are you ready for the changes? Most districts will be capped at 100 TBS of pooled storage if they are not using any premium licenses or upgrades and are using the Google Workspace for Educational Fundamentals edition. All of your users (active and suspended) and all of their data (including but not necessarily limited to data from Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail) will count toward your storage limit. Additionally, schools will not be able to purchase additional storage. Schools that need more storage will have to delete files and users to reduce their storage footprint and get under their pooled storage limit or purchase Google Workspace for Education Plus licenses or the Teaching and Learning upgrade.

The changes are coming. Do you know how much storage you’re using right now?

Find Out How Much Storage Your District Is Using Google Admin Console

Apps Reports

The reports within Google Admin Console can help you get a sense for how your school district will be impacted by these upcoming changes. To access the reports, go to the Google Admin Console > Reporting > Apps Reports > Accounts. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can see your total storage used as well as how much your storage has changed over time.

Finding Your Largest Users

You can also use the reports in the Google Admin Console to find users with the highest storage usage. This report is found by opening the Google Admin Console > Reporting > User Reports > Apps Usage. You can add filters to this report based on “Total Storage used (MB).” So, if you filtered based on “Total Storage used (MB) greater than 10,000,” you could find anyone using more than 10 GBs of storage. This data can also be exported to Google Sheets, so you can better query and manage the data.

This was somewhat surprising to us in my former district. We noticed we were getting about 20 GBs away from the quota. To address this we deleted 15,000 old users. We found that deleting these 15,000 users only freed up about 300 GBs worth of data because 50% had never actually used their account before. When we ran this report, however, we found that one of our journalism teachers was using 15 TBs of storage. So, this one teacher was using 15% of a shared storage pool meant to be shared with 18,000 users.

GAM

Google Apps Manager, better known as GAM, is a free, open-source command line tool that helps Google Workspace Super Administrators manage their domain. Not familiar with GAM? Check out our upcoming webinar, Take Command with GAM, to see how you can install, configure, and use GAM in your domain.

Already use GAM? Here are a few commands you can use to help gain insight into how much storage you’re using.

Find Non-Suspended Users with More than 15 GBs Worth of Files in Their Google Drive

gam config csv_output_row_filter "accounts.*used_quota_in_mb:count>=15000" redirect csv ./BigUsers.csv report users fields accounts:drive_used_quota_in_mb,accounts:used_quota_in_mb

Find Google Drive Usage Data

gam report usage customer parameters drive:num_collaborators,drive:num_consumers,drive:num_creators start_date 2020-01-01 todrive

Are You Ready for the 2022-2023 School Year?

Do you have enough storage for the next 3 school year? Use the reports to get a sense for how much data you’re using and also forecast how much your storage may grow in the next year. If we look at the chart above, we see that Roosevelt Public Schools is using roughly 60 TBs of data and growing by roughly 16 TBs a year. At first glance they appear to be well below the 100 TB limit, but beginning May 1 all newly created or modified files in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Jamboard will begin counting toward the storage limit. This will be roughly 100 MBs of new storage per user per month that was not counted in the past.

Roosevelt Public Schools’ 15,000 users would be 18 TBs of new data created in the next year. Combining that with our 60 TBs of existing storage and the 16 TBs of growth we were already anticipating puts the district at 94 TBs of storage. Right up against the storage limits.

Additional Resources

Storage+

KIT Central Storage+ allows you to manage your organization’s storage needs with precision and flexibility. Simple dashboards give you a quick overview of storage usage for your entire domain and on a per-user basis. This allows you to quickly identify what files are taking up the most room in your domain and how to optimize for this usage. Additionally, KIT Central Storage+ helps you understand what unused files in your domain can be moved into Google Cloud Storage Buckets to free up space. These insights make a significant difference in managing your organization’s storage needs.

Free Webinar

Yikes! The End of Unlimited Storage!

Sign up for our webinar and learn about Google Workspace for Education domain storage changes and the impact it will have on your domain. Utilize tools for more insights into what is being stored in your Google environment to reduce overall storage.