Changes to Unlimited Storage

In February 2021, Google announced that they are ending unlimited storage for Google Workspace for Education users, the system that CalArts utilizes across our community, in July 2022. Unfortunately, this is part of an ongoing trend toward eliminating free storage across the industry.

For alumnx who use a name@alum.calarts.edu email, the email account will not be going away. You will be able to retain and continue to use the email after July 2022. However, Google’s limits on storage mean that we have to prioritize the storage needs of our current students. As a result, the storage services associated with your account (Drive, Photos, Docs, etc) will be eliminated, and storage for email will likely be restricted as well.

Google Drive Update (9/28/22): Due to Google’s imposition of a new storage limit to their services all alumnx drive files and photos will be deleted on December 5, 2022. This includes all files associated with Google Drive like Google Doc, Sheets, Slides, Shared Drives, Photos, and media files. If you have not taken the necessary measures to download your files it is imperative that you contact CalArts IT at cait@calarts.edu as soon as possible. CalArts IT will not be able to recover any files after the deadline.

Follow the steps below to gain access to your alumnx drive to download any remaining files:

  1. Contact cait@calarts.edu with your username and graduation year.
  2. IT will provide you with a 2-week window to download all your files.
  3. Download all the files you wish to keep.
  4. Download before the December 5, 2022 deadline or you will lose all remaining files.

Google Storage/Gmail FAQs

In February 2021, Google announced that they will be ending unlimited storage for the system that CalArts utilizes across our community, Google Workspace for Education users, in July 2022. An exact date for this change has not been identified by Google. This is part of an ongoing trend in the industry to eliminate free storage. This change affects all Google-provided storage, from email to Drive.

Students and alumnx who currently have an alum.calarts.edu email account will NOT lose the email account. Storage in this account may be restricted, however. We anticipate that these accounts will remain active in perpetuity, though perhaps in slightly different forms. However, the unlimited storage that is currently associated with these accounts will be severely limited as of July 2022, and Google Drive storage, among other services such as Photos, will no longer be available to CalArts alumnx.

Most importantly, we are communicating these impending changes to you in a timely manner so that you can prepare. While this change won’t happen until July 2022, we recognize that many of you are currently using Google storage and we want to ensure that you have as much notice and information about this transition as possible. 

We are also discussing options with Google and they have promised to provide tools to help all users manage their storage by the end of 2021. As soon as we have additional information, we will provide it to you in a timely manner.

The most important first step is to understand how much storage you are utilizing. Standard, free Google accounts allow for 15GB of free storage so if you are utilizing this much storage or less, we don’t anticipate that you would be impacted by this change as you can simply migrate data from one location to the other.

Here are some steps that you can take to understand how much storage you are using and how you can reduce your storage:

  • Confirm how much storage you are using;  

  • Review and delete large or unnecessary files in Drive and in Shared drives (You can sort from largest to smallest and eliminate the largest files first) as well as emails in Gmail; 

  • Delete Drive files that you may have copied to a shared drive. If a file resides in two locations, it may be consuming twice your storage space.

  • Transfer important files to portable hard drives. (Google Takeout is a tool that allows users to export a copy of content in their Google Accounts for backup or for another service.)

There are a number of alternative (fee-based) options for Google Drive active storage:

Alternative options for archival/backup storage, for a fee, include:

We will ensure that any alumnx-faculty or staff members who have been utilizing their personal alum.calarts.edu accounts for work-related storage will have access to appropriate storage options to house their work-related files.