TANSTAAFL?!?
Say what?? TANSTAAFL stands for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” (my apologies to the English professors!). Sometimes, things that appear to be “free” usually have some hidden cost to someone. What does this have to do with Google storage? Everything …
In 2007, when we switched to Google for our email service, Google offered “email for life” and “unlimited storage”. You didn’t need to worry about how many emails you had or how much storage you used in drive files and photos. It was “unlimited” and “free”. Well, that has changed.
Google has changed its policy of offering unlimited storage to a limited, shared “pooled” storage amount for the entire University. All educational institutions using Google are given a specific amount of storage based on the size of their university. If Harding goes over our allotted storage, we will not be able to save anything else (drive files or photos) until we are under our quota.
Because of this, we will be instituting storage quotas in the coming weeks and months for all @harding.edu accounts. Our goal is to be good stewards of the pooled storage we have been allotted with minimal disruptions to our users’ productivity.
To see how much storage you are currently using, just go to https://drive.google.com/drive/quota while logged into your @harding.edu account. You will see your total storage used as well as the breakdown for Drive, Gmail and Photos.
Stay tuned for more information on how we will begin implementing storage quotas. We’ll try to make it as painless as possible … 
- Lora Fleener