Introducing one terabyte Google Workspace storage limits for select Ryerson accounts

To: All active Ryerson Google Workspace for Education account holders

On February 23, 2022, Computing and Communications Services plans to impose storage limits on select Ryerson Google Workspace accounts. The combined Gmail and Google Drive storage for these accounts will not be allowed to exceed one terabyte (TB) of data. This message comes as an update to our March 2021 announcement of Google's storage policy changes for educational institutions.

The accounts affected by this change include staff, student, academic assistant, retiree and alumni accounts.

The accounts not affected by this change include department accounts, generic accounts, shared drives and instructor accounts. Limits of one TB or more on these accounts will not be determined until later in 2022. 

Checking your account’s storage

Most accounts at Ryerson are well below the limit of one TB, which is the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes (GB). We estimate fewer than 0.3 per cent of accounts will be affected by this change.

Please check your current storage usage (external link) . If you are well below the 1,000 GB limit, there is nothing you need to do. If you are nearing or over the 1,000 GB limit, we provide guidance in the next section on deleting or removing files in Drive and Gmail.

What to do if your account is near or over the limit

If you are not an instructor and your personal account is near or in excess of 1,000 GB, the following recommendations may help:

• Delete emails and files you are certain you no longer need.
• If you are backing up computer hard drives to Google Drive, back up your files elsewhere, such as another cloud service or to removable storage.
• If you have large personal media files, move them off Google Drive. If you are a Ryerson staff member, you may consider moving work-related media files to a shared department drive.

Why are there storage limits?

Earlier this year, Google announced that it would no longer provide free unlimited storage to educational institutions using Google Workspace. In response, Ryerson worked with Google to analyze our current usage and to develop limits that both reduced the university’s storage use while also allowing most people to continue working unaffected by the change. The one TB limit for most accounts is the result of our agreement with Google.

As we measure the impact of storage limits later in 2022, we will develop a set of storage quotas and options for instructor and generic accounts as well as shared drives.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please contact the Computing and Communications Services (CCS) Help Desk via the IT Help portal, help@torontomu.ca or 416-979-5000, ext. 556840 (students) or ext. 556806 (employees).