2. Understand storage availability and usage (2024)

Google Workspace for Education editions provide a baseline of 100 TB of pooled storage for your institution, and options for increasing storage.

Step 1: Calculate your storage limit

The amount of storage your organization has depends on your edition:

• Education Fundamentals: 100 TB of pooled storage shared by your organization
• Education Standard: 100 TB of pooled storage shared by your organization
• Teaching and Learning Upgrade: 100 TB of pooled storage shared by your organization, plus 100 GB added to the shared pool per license. Note: If you purchase the licenses through your Admin console or a reseller on a flexible plan, to make the storage available to your organization you must assign the licenses to users.
• Education Plus: 100 TB of pooled storage shared by your organizations, plus 20 GB added to the shared pool per license. Customers continuing on legacy G Suite Enterprise for Education licenses have 100 GB added to their shared pool per paid employee license.

Note: Institutions with greater than 20,000 active users receive additional baseline storage of 5 GB per user for each active user over 20,000.

• Active users are counted as the peak number of 30-day unique logins over the past 180 days.You can estimate your active users by reviewing 30-day unique logins.Learn how to see your 30-day unique logins.
• Your active user count and additional storage based on active users are automatically calculated and updated twice per year. These additional storage grants are made on April 1 and October 1.

Example storage limit calculations

• If you purchased 10,000 Google Workspace for Education Plus licenses, the storage pool is 300 TB:

  100 TB (base storage) + (10,000 licenses x 20 GB = 200 TB) = 300 TB available storage

• If you purchased 100 Teaching and Learning Upgrade licenses, the storage pool is 110 TB:

  100 TB (base storage) + (100 licenses x 100 GB = 10 TB) = 110 TB available storage

Step 2. Learn how storage is used

Use admin storage management tools, reporting and logs to understand your storage usage:

• Review storage in the Admin console—Get an overview of which services, users, and shared drives use the most storage (instructions in the next section).
• Create Account reports—Determine current storage usage by user and identify outliers. You can export these reports to Google Sheets. Learn how to create account reports
• Manage shared drives—Learn how shared drives are used in your organization and determine their storage use. Learn how to manage shared drive users and activity
• Use BigQuery logs—Export report data to BigQuery to query and visualize your storage usage, including storage usage by service. Requires Google Workspace for Education Plus. Learn how to analyze storage logs in BigQuery

Review your total storage usage

1. Sign in to your GoogleAdminconsole.

   See Also

   Starting This Spring, Google to Limit Storage on Higher Education Accounts | News | The Harvard CrimsonHow do you activate 100GB of free Google Drive storage on my Chromebook? - CoolblueAn update to storage policies across your Google AccountSave Money on Digital Storage With These Google Drive Tricks

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. In the Admin console, go to MenuStorage.

3. At the top, you can see how much total storage your organization is using, and storage used by Drive, Gmail, and Photos.

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.

Identify who uses the most storage

You can review storage usage by users in a couple ways. You can use the Storage page:

1. Sign in to your GoogleAdminconsole.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. In the Admin console, go to MenuStorage.

3. In the Users using the most storage section, you can see which users use the most storage.

If you want more details, such as usage by service, create an account report:

1. Sign in to your GoogleAdminconsole.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

   See Also

   Changes Coming Soon to Google's Storage Policy - News - University IT

2. In the Admin console, go to MenuReportingReportsUser ReportsAccounts.

3. On the report, click Download .
4. Under Select columns, click Currently selected columns or All columns.
5. Click Download.
6. Click Open in Google Sheets.
7. Sort the data by the Total storage used (MB) column.

Identify shared drives using the most storage

1. Sign in to your GoogleAdminconsole.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. In the Admin console, go to MenuStorage.

3. The Shared drives using the most storage section gives you a summary of high-storage shared drives.
4. To open a list of all shared drives ranked by storage use, click View all shared drives.