Google Storage FAQs

Google announced the elimination of free, unlimited storage in Gmail, Drive, and Google Photos for its higher education clients. This will require storage allocations to be placed on every active account. We aim to maintain service quality, minimize disruption, and contain costs while addressing immediate storage needs and planning for the future.

The storage limitations depend on your role at the university:

You will receive 10GB in your student account and 40GB in your employee account.

If you are over your allotment on October 30th, 2024:

• You cannot upload new files or images to Google Drive.
• You cannot create files in collaborative content creation applications like Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, or Forms. Until you reduce your storage usage, you cannot edit or copy affected files or submit forms.
• You cannot back up any photos or videos to Google Photos.
• You cannot record new meetings in Google Meet.
• You cannot create assignments with new files, export grades to Google Sheets, or make copies of Assignments in Google Classroom.

The following services will still be available to you:

• You can still sign in.
• You can still view emails.
• You can still view and download files stored in Google Drive.
• You can still view and download photos stored in Google Photos.

Your storage is shared across all Google Workspace applications, including Gmail, Google Photos & Google Drive. Files that are shared with you and shared drives created in Drive do not count towards your storage limit.

No. Shared Drives are separate from MyDrive, shared drives will have a 15 GB default storage quota. Owners of existing Shared Drives should start to limit their storage levels accordingly, additional notifications will be sent out to about time table for clearing these accounts.

Yes, archived mail counts toward your storage allotment.

You can view a summary of your Google storage consumption by selecting storage on the bottom of the left hand menu in your Google Drive. Here you will be able to see the consumption being used by Drive, Gmail, and Photos. You can edit your Drive files from this location but you will need to log into Gmail and Photos individually to start removing files.

Individuals cannot purchase additional storage for their Fordham Google Account. You can free up Google storage space by removing emails, files, photos, and documents from your Fordham Google account through deletion or transferring them to an alternative storage method.

We aim to maintain service quality, minimize disruption, and contain costs while addressing immediate storage needs and planning for the future which may include some situations in which data cannot be removed from Google Drive for business reasons. If you believe you have data that falls into this category, please complete the following form and we will review your request and get back to you.

You can download copies of emails, files, and photos. Once copies are stored on your local computer, external storage media, or another storage method, you can delete the emails, files, or photos from your Fordham account to free up storage space. 

Google Drive for Desktop will allow you to choose folders in your Google Drive content and save them directly to your PC or Mac. You can copy/paste or drag/drop files to your local computer, external storage media, or another cloud storage account but you will not be able to keep the files within Google Drive for Desktop to reduce storage without removing them permanently.

Remember to empty each of your trash bins and refresh your browser. Storage will remain in use until files are permanently deleted in each of the separate applications.

It is advised not to transfer files to Fordham’s OneDrive because Microsoft’s cloud applications will have the same storage limits as Google for Education.

The University provides guidance in this area. Email sent or received via Fordham’s Gmail servers is retained for a period of eight years. Any messages that are over eight years old will be automatically deleted.