Google Drive Storage Reduction Update

As of December 31, 2022, Google changed its Education Workspace Storage offering from Unlimited storage to a limit of 100 Terabytes (TB) on the free Education Workspace tier. Under Google’s new Higher Education offering, ASU as an enterprise will have 100 TB of available storage across all users in our Google environment. To comply with these new storage limits, ASU Enterprise Technology is working with support units across the university to reduce ASU’s storage footprint. More information can be found on ET’s FAQ.

Currently, Google is offering a grace period for accounts that are over-quota. However, excess data will be subject to deletion following this grace period on May 29, 2023. In order to avoid the deletion of over-quota data, ASU community members must migrate or archive excess files as soon as possible. The following are the options for data storage needs that exceed the storage cap set by Google:

  1. You can move your data to another storage platform such as ASU Dropbox or ASU OneDrive. If you are an ASU researcher, you may request a single, 250 GB Shared Drive quota for individual researchers, provided by the Knowledge Enterprise.

    1. To request a personal Google Workspace quota for researchers please submit a ticket to ServiceNow.

    2. To request a Shared Drive Google Workspace quota for researchers please submit a ticket to ServiceNow.

  2. If you do not wish to migrate your data, you may purchase additional Google Workspace storage. This additional storage is $3,600 per year for 10 TBs and must be purchased in 10 TB allotments. Please contact Enterprise Technology to purchase additional Google Workspace storage.

  3. You can delete old, unnecessary files from your ASU Google Workspace. If, for whatever reason, you are having difficulty or are unable to delete data from your Workspace, the data can be removed for you. However, specific files cannot be removed – all files must be deleted at once. Therefore, if you would like ET to delete data on your behalf, please move all data you will be keeping into a separate drive. ET can purge all of the leftover, irrelevant data remaining in your ASU Google Workspace. 

In addition, Research Computing offers data storage services and can assist researchers in migrating data from Google Drive onto Research Computing systems as appropriate. These services are for raw, intermediate, and final data products associated with research conducted at ASU and are not for general-purpose data storage. Please contact rtshelp@asu.edu to request assistance if you have not already addressed your Google Drive storage. 

Alternative cloud storage services such as DropBox and Microsoft OneDrive are accessible from the Agave and Sol supercomputing systems with tools such as rclone. However, unlike Google Drive, these services are not currently accessible via Globus.

ASU Research Computing Data Storage Offerings

  • Research Computing offers a Project Based Data Storage service that provides network data storage for data accessed regularly for the duration of a typical research project period (3-5 years). Researchers may purchase this storage for $50/TB/year. This storage is presented to users as a traditional "network drive" or mounted network filesystem.

  • Research Computing also offers a Long Term Data Storage service suitable for storing large volumes of infrequently accessed data beyond the duration of a typical research project (3 or more years). This storage resides in a private campus cloud compatible with protocols such as S3. Researchers may purchase this storage for $10/TB/year. 

Rates and other information for all Research Computing services may be accessed at http://links.asu.edu/services.