Schools and universities with Google Workspace for Education subscriptions have a baseline of 100 TB of pooled storage shared across all users. That’s enough storage for approximately over 100 million documents, 8 million presentations, or 400,000 hours of video.
You can use administrator tools in your Google Admin console to understand how much storage you’re using, set storage limits, and identify accounts that use a disproportionate amount of storage.
For details and best practices, see the following FAQ, the next pages in this series, and download the Storage Guide for Admins.
Storage FAQ
What does pooled storage mean? What counts toward pooled storage?Pooled storage is storage shared across your users for everything in their accounts and shared drives. This includes, but is not limited to, Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photo files. Starting May 2, 2022, new and updated Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Drawings files count toward your organization's storage quota.
To manage how your pooled storage is allocated to users, you can use your Admin console to assign different limits for different groups of users.
Note: Deleted messages and files retained by Google Vault don’t count against the user’s storage quota or your institution's total pooled storage.
The new storage policy took effect for Google Workspace for Education customers in July 2022.
Schools and universities have a baseline of 100 TB of pooled storage shared across users and accounts. If you need more storage, see What if I need more storage?
Google Workspace storage is sold and calculated in binary units. For example, Education Standard customers get 100 TiB pooled storage, equal to ~110 TB.
No. To use all features in the storage management tools, you need the Storage administrator role, or have the privileges included with the Storage administrator role. If you have only some of the privileges, you might be able to use some storage management features.
You can see how much storage your entire organization or a single account is using.
See the storage usage for your entire organization
Important: The total storage won't include Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, or Drawings files created before May 2, 2022.
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Sign in with an administrator account to the Google Admin console.
If you aren’t using an administrator account, you can’t access the Admin console.
- At the top, you can see how much Workspace storage your organization is using.
Note: It can take up to 24 hours for changes in your organization’s storage to be reflected on the storage management page in your Admin console.
Note: When you review your storage usage, you might see a new category of storage called "Other" in your storage meter. This is a new category that gives admins better visibility into the storage users have from Android backups, including WhatsApp. While this storage shows in your storage meter, we do not have plans to charge for this data. If that changes, we will provide at least 90 days notice to customers in advance of that change.
See the storage status for a single user
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Sign in with an administrator account to the Google Admin console.
If you aren’t using an administrator account, you can’t access the Admin console.
- Click a user's name to open their account page.
At the top of the page, you can see the percentages of mail and Drive storage utilized by the user.
Can my users see how much storage they have available?
Yes. Your users can see how much space they have available by going to the Drive Storage page.
Yes, storage used by suspended users counts towards your storage pool.
Organizations that need additional storage can remove existing content or upgrade their edition of Google Workspace for Education. Education customers can also purchase Workspace Additional Storage to increase their pooled storage in 10 TB increments. For more information, see Free up or get more storage for your institution.
Google Cloud offers a number of storage options to meet your needs, such as Google Cloud Storage. Google Cloud storage offers a variety of object-level storage tiers depending on how frequently you intend to access your data. It provides a cost-effective method to store and access your files. You can use open source tools like Rclone or other third-party tools to migrate data to Google Cloud Storage. For more details, contact your Google Cloud Sales representative or contact sales.
If an individual user exceeds their storage limit, there will be an immediate service impact.
If either an individual user or an organization exceeds their storage limit, there will be an immediate service impact to Google Photos, which will prevent users from adding or backing up any photos.
If a organization exceeds its storage limit by 25% or for 14 days (whichever comes first), the following services will be impacted:
- They can’t upload new files or images to Google Drive.
- They can’t create files in collaborative content creation apps, such as Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, and Forms. Until they reduce storage usage, nobody can edit or copy their affected files or submit forms owned by the user.
- They can’t record new meetings in Google Meet.
- They can still sign in to and access their Google Workspace for Education account, view and download their files, and send and receive emails.
In Google Classroom, if a teacher's storage is full:
- Teachers can’t create assignments with new files that they haven't yet uploaded or created.
- Teachers can't export grades to Google Sheets.
- Students can't submit assignments with file attachments.
- If a student's storage is full, the student can't access files in Assignments that prompt the student to make a copy.
Learn more about what happens if an organization exceeds its storage limit for more than 14 days.
Next: Understand storage availability and usage
