Until now, Google allowed educational institutions unlimited data for their users, meaning any academic, or school-affiliated Google Account would be able to store an unlimited amount of files without a cap on storage.

However, Google recently announced the discontinuation of unlimited storage for academic-facilitated Google Accounts and is now charging institutions to buy an allotment of total storage for their university or institution. NAU has made the decision to procure an allotment of storage to stay within the Google infrastructure and continue to provide the G-Suite applications to the NAU Community, with a 25-gigabyte cap on storage.

The 25-gigabyte storage cap will go into effect on February 1st, 2023 on all NAU-affiliated Google accounts. This includes all students, faculty, and staff.

If you’re currently using less than 25 gigabytes on your NAU Google account, you won’t need to do anything at this time. However, it is essential that you consistently monitor your storage usage.

Note: you must be signed into your NAU Google Account while using the link above.

If you are over the 25-gigabyte cap; you will need to delete or move files to an alternate storage provider to avoid losing the functionality of your NAU Google account.

Beginning January 23rd of 2023, all NAU Google Shared Drives will have a default storage cap of 100 GB.

All NAU students, faculty, and staff have access to up to 1TB (1,000 gigabytes) of free storage in Microsoft OneDrive. To learn more about Microsoft OneDrive, visit ITS’ knowledge base article on how to download and use Microsoft 365, which includes OneDrive.

For a complete list of available storage offerings, visit ITS’ File Sharing and Storage page, where you can view what storage services are available to you by your affiliation (students, faculty, staff).

If you feel that your work at NAU is contingent on a larger storage allocation; you can submit a request for a higher storage cap, which will be approved on a case-by-case basis and will raise an individual’s storage cap to 100 GB.

Your Google storage will be displayed in your Google Drive and Gmail homepages’ lower left column. You can also check your Google storage usage by visiting https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota.

If you exceed your storage usage or are above 25 gigabytes in your NAU Google account by February 1st, the following will occur:

• Users will not be able to upload files or images to Google Drive.
• Users will not be able able to create or edit files in collaborative content apps such as Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, and Jamboard. NOTE: Other Google users will not be able to edit a collaborative document owned by a user over their storage cap until the owner of the file reduces their storage.
• Users won’t be able to back up photos and videos in Google Photos.
• Users won’t be able to record meetings in Google Meet.

Users over the storage cap will still be able to log in to their NAU Google account, view and download files, as well as send and receive emails.

Yes, Google is providing users a tool called ‘Takeout’, that will allow users to easily transfer data to an alternate Google Account. You will need a personal Google Account to transfer your files over to.

Use Google’s Takeout Tool

Note: When using Google’s Takeout tool, you must be signed in to your NAU Google Account.

All alumni NAU Google Accounts will also have the 25-gigabyte storage cap in place on their account. For assistance logging into your NAU Google Account, visit our NAU Google Account website, and navigate to the ‘alumni’ section.