In 2007, when Harding 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”.
All of that has changed. Google recently announced the end of unlimited storage in Google Workspace (GMail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google Drive, Photos) for all its customers. As a result, the university needs to make significant changes in how it administers Google Workspace accounts. Google is changing its storage scheme to a limited, shared “pooled” storage amount for the entire university. All educational institutions using Google have been 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 the entire organization is under our quota.
Because of this, Harding had to make the difficult decision to delete all accounts that are not current students, current employees or retirees of the University. We will also 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.
Storage quotas have been set for the following accounts and will be enforced beginning June 15, 2024.
- Current students -- 50 GB
- Current employees -- 100 GB
- Retirees (those who qualify under the "rule of 80") -- 100 GB
If you are over your allotted storage quota, we are asking that you clean up your data and keep only the most important data needed to accomplish your school work or your job as a University employee. Please consider moving your personal data to a non-Harding account. We understand that some accounts may require more than 100 GB of storage for their work with the University. If you need more than 100 GB for university-related business, please fill out this form. Filling out this form is not a guarantee of more storage. This will simply allow us to investigate your request.
See the information below (provided by Google) on how to move your personal data out of your @harding.edu account to a non-Harding personal account.
Google Takeout -- Takeout allows you to "takeout" all of your personal data from your @harding.edu account to a personal account (does not have to be a @gmail.com account). Things to know:
- You can choose which content to move. You can move some or all of your data
- Your data will be uploaded into different formats, depending on the data
- Takeout creates a "zipped archive" of your data and you will need to "unzip" your data, upload it and process it, depending on the application. It will be in different formats
- See this link for instructions on how to use Google Takeout
- There are check boxes in Google Takeout for each service -- it is recommended that you click "Deselect all" and then only check one service to "takeout" at a time -- large files can sometimes cause problems when the data is moved
- Sharing permissions do not migrate
- This process will make a copy of your data, not move it, so there is no risk of data loss in the process
Moving Photos
If you need to move photos from your @harding.edu account to a personal GMail account, there are a few different ways to do this.
- Partner Sharing -- follow these instructions provided by Google to set up partner sharing between your @harding.edu account and your personal GMail account. A few things to note:
- Remember to "Save your partner's photos" to permanently add your photos to your personal GMail account so you will not lose them when they are deleted from your @harding.edu account
- When the process has fully completed (it could take some time), remove the partner sharing from your @harding.edu account and make sure that your photos have been saved in your personal GMail account before deleting them from your @harding.edu account
- This method does not allow you to move photos in albums you may have already set up. They are transferred by date
- Download/Upload Photos from Computer -- you can download your photos from your @harding.edu account and save them locally on your computer. You can then upload them into your photos in your personal GMail account.
- This method does allow you to move photo albums you may have already set up
- Google Takeout -- you can use Google Takeout to download your photos from your @harding.edu account. It will give you a .zip file that you will then need to "unzip" and then upload the photos into your personal GMail account.
Moving Contacts
If you need to move Contacts from your @harding.edu account to a personal GMail account, please use these instructions provided by Google.
If you need assistance in cleaning up your storage, please contact Client Support at (501)279-4440.