Google has eliminated the free unlimited storage offering that they have provided to the K-12 and higher education community along with their rebranding from Google G Suite for Education to Google Workspace Education. UCLA currently uses more than six times our storage allocation in our entire Google Workspace for Education environment based on our current contract, and we need to reduce our storage to below our allocation, or the university will be charged significant fees. We have until November 1, 2024, to complete the adjustment to our services, reduce our overall storage usage, and implement quotas to all UCLA Google individual accounts and Shared Drives accordingly. 

• Check your current storage usage relative to your Permanent Baseline Quota.
• Find your largest files. Watch the How to Find My Largest File in Google Drive video to learn how to find the largest files in your storage.
• Remove or transfer your data. Visit Tips for Storage Hygiene and watch the How to Transfer Google Mail and Drive to a Personal Google Account 
  and How to Verify Your Content is Being Migrated videos for instructions.
• Explore alternate storage options. Depending on your needs and affiliation, UCLA offers several storage options to safely store your data. Visit the Purchasing and Alternate Storage Options page to identify the best-fitting solution for your data needs.
• Visit the Training and Support page. Watch training videos on the Training and Support page to learn more.
• Schedule time with an IT professional. Email help@it.ucla.edu to request personalized assistance. 

All UCLA Google Workspace users and shared drives must be within their Permanent Baseline Quota – or approved storage limit tier, for eligible affiliation groups – by April 7, 2026. 

All users must take immediate action to ensure compliance. 

All UCLA Google accounts that are not within their approved quota by April 7, 2026 will experience service interruptions.

Service interruptions may include measures such as email subject tags, banners in Google Drive, and account disablement.

All UCLA Google Workspace users and shared drives are subject to the Permanent Baseline Quotas. Visit the Permanent Baseline Quotas page to see the Permanent Baseline Quota assigned to each affiliation/account type. ​

All UCLA Google Workspace users who are near or over their storage quota will be notified via email in the coming months that they must take immediate action to reduce their storage or their account will be subject to service interruptions. 

You can check your overall Google storage usage and breakdown of usage in Google Drive, Gmail, and Photos by following the directions at Personal Drives: How to check your current storage usage and capacity.

As of April 7, 2026 accounts exceeding their Permanent Baseline Quotas will experience service interruptions. Service interruptions may include measures such as email subject tags, banners in Google Drive, and account disablement.

Users who are over their approved storage quota must take immediate action to reduce their data storage. 

If you are under your Permanent Baseline Quota, there is no further action to take unless you receive an email explaining how you are otherwise affected. Keep your Google Workspace Storage usage under your Permanent Baseline Quota and you will not experience service interruptions

If your account exceeds you Permanent Baseline Quota and becomes disabled, you need to access this form to request a temporary, two-week re-enablement of their Google Workspace account. 

Once you've regained access, you must take immediate action to reduce your storage use to below your Permanent Baseline Quota.

Options to obtain additional storage include the following:​

• Remove or transfer unnecessary data. Visit Tips for Storage Hygiene for guidance.
• Explore alternate storage options. Depending on your needs and affiliation, UCLA offers several storage options to safely store your data. Refer to the alternate storage options on the DTS website to identify the best-fitting solution for your data needs.
• Consider purchasing Google Workspace storage. If you wish to maintain your existing data storage in Google Workspace, you may be eligible to purchase additional storage. See purchasing section for more information.

UCLA Gmail will continue to send and receive email if your account is active, regardless of your storage consumption. Please note that if your Google account is over quota after April 7, 2026, your account services including email will be at risk of service disruption.

No, they are attributed to the owner’s account. 

If your affiliation changes, your UCLA Google account permanent baseline quota will be adjusted to the baseline quota assigned to your new primary affiliation. Note that community members with multiple affiliations will be assigned their permanent baseline quota based on their primary affiliation, which is set in the following order: faculty (including emeriti), staff, students, retirees, alumni.

For example, if your affiliation changes from faculty to retiree, the change will be processed when the subsequent quarterly affiliation audit is complete. Once your new affiliation is made official, you will receive a message from ITS confirming your new permanent baseline quota. You will have approximately 4 weeks to reduce your storage usage until it is under your new permanent baseline quota.

Permanent Baseline Quotas were implemented on all UCLA Google Personal Drives and Shared Drives on June 27, 2024. 

All UCLA Google Workspace users and shared drives are assigned to a storage limit “tier” based on your affiliation type. This storage limit tier corresponds to your Permanent Baseline Quota. 

The storage quota represents the maximum amount of complimentary storage space that is available to you in your UCLA Google Workspace account. This means that you are able to consume up to your storage limit / Permanent Baseline Quota across all of your Google Workspace apps, free of charge. Users who are over their storage quota may be subject to service interruptions. 

Note: For Faculty, Research, Academic Appointees, Staff, and registered research shared drives, your storage limit may be higher than your Permanent Baseline Quota if you have requested a storage increase.

Read more about Permanent Baseline Quotas for each user affiliation.

UCLA’s data storage quotas are based on the total amount of available storage, current storage needs, and how that space is being used across campus.

Because Google Workspace storage is a shared resource, individual quotas may change over time in response to campus-wide storage capacity and utilization. Quotas may be adjusted—either increased or decreased—to ensure sufficient storage availability and equitable access to resources for the broader Bruin community.

Over quota users are all individuals whose personal Google Workspace storage and/or groups whose Shared Drive storage is over the established Permanent Baseline Quota for their affiliation type. 

For example, active UCLA students have a Permanent Baseline Quota of 20GB; any student whose Google Workspace storage usage is over 20GB is considered an over quota user. 

Over quota users must take immediate action to reduce their storage usage to within their storage quota, or their Google account will experience service interruptions. 

Check your current storage usage to confirm if you are within your Permanent Baseline Quota.

If you are near or over your storage quota, please take the following steps to address all over quota data: 

• Remove or transfer unnecessary data. Visit Tips for Storage Hygiene for guidance.
• Explore alternate storage options. Depending on your needs and affiliation, UCLA offers several storage options to safely store your data. Refer to the alternate storage options on the DTS website to identify the best-fitting solution for your data needs.
• Consider purchasing Google Workspace storage. If you wish to maintain your existing data storage in Google Workspace, you may be eligible to purchase additional storage. See purchasing section below for more information.

Select UCLA affiliation types are eligible to request Google Workspace storage increases, free of charge. This includes personal drives belonging to Faculty, Research, Academic Appointees, and Staff, as well as registered research shared drives. 

Please review the Quota Extension Eligibility page for more information and how to submit a request for storage increase. 

UCLA DTS is pleased to be working on a new purchase offering for select groups that is expected to be available in summer 2026. At this time, groups eligible for storage purchases will include Faculty, Research, Academic Appointees, and Staff, as well as registered research shared drives.

While non-research shared drives are not eligible for individual storage purchases, you may be able to work with your department leaders to purchase a high-volume department shared drive. 

In February 2021, Google announced a new model for Google Workspace for Education (GWE) and an end to unlimited storage, effective July 2022. As UCLA’s existing storage went beyond the new model’s limits, DTS undertook a major effort to promote awareness of this change, contain further growth, and reduce our campus data storage usage.

Additionally, DTS restructured the UCLA Google Workspace service model to expand the complimentary Permanent Baseline Quotas available to many of the UCLA Google Workspace user groups. These new storage quotas not only increased the storage capacity for key academic and research contributors; they also sufficiently cover the storage requirements for the vast majority of all UCLA Google Workspace users. 

Despite significant progress to reduce storage, there are many cases in which users may wish to retain data that significantly exceeds their storage quotas. To accommodate the need for extraordinarily large storage capacity while being sensitive to the overall campus storage and budget constraints, DTS is working on a process to give select user groups the ability to pay for additional storage space for their own personal or shared Google drive. 

The UCLA Google Workspace team is working to create additional storage tiers that are available to select user groups for purchase. Once the form is live in summer 2026, users eligible to purchase Google Workspace storage will submit an online order for their desired storage tier. 

By purchasing a storage tier, you are unlocking access to use up to the designated storage limit. For example, if your storage tier limit is currently 500GB and you purchase access to the 1TB tier, you will be then able to use up to 1TB of storage space. 

The pilot Google Workspace storage purchase form will be available in summer 2026. In the interim, if your storage exceeds your Permanent Baseline Quota and/or you plan to purchase storage and wish to avoid service interruptions, you may submit the intent to purchase form.

This form will temporarily move you to the desired storage tier until the official purchase form is live. 

The final cost of Google Workspace storage is still under review. However, to assist with budget planning, users can expect to pay around $80 per TB, per 6 months ($160 per TB annually). Please note that this storage price is provided as an estimate only and is subject to change. 

In June 2025, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Creative Activities sponsored a temporary extension for eligible Personal Drives and Registered Research Shared Drives through December 2026. 

This means that individual users will not be charged for excess data storage costs until 2027. 

To support a seamless transition to this new purchase model, DTS is proactively launching a pilot purchase phase in summer 2026. Users (“subscribers”) will not be charged for purchases made during the pilot term. 

A Full Accounting Unit (FAU) is a charge code that allows UCLA departments to use funds for approved purchases and track department spending. At this time, an active FAU is required to purchase Google Workspace storage. 

If the FAU provided on the purchase form is not active and cannot be corrected, the purchase will not be processed and your account may be subject to service interruptions. 

Grant funding usage varies depending on the terms of each individual grant. Please contact your department leadership or grant administrator to confirm eligibility. 

Familiarize yourself and comply with the UC records management program by: (1) knowing the content of records; (2) confirming the retention period based on content per the UC Records Retention Schedule (3) securely disposing of records when the retention period ends. 

Do not dispose of any records that are subject to a legal action/legal hold; such records must be retained for as long as pending legal process is active.  

Behind the scenes, there is a substantial difference. The University of California negotiated a system-wide agreement that gives the university administrative and legal ownership of the data within, and ensures UC security requirements are upheld. This means that UC’s Electronic Communications Policy protects your account. Also, UCLA Google Workspace accounts are branded with our ucla.edu domain and users are not presented with advertising. 

The current process documentation outlines what happens when you leave UCLA or graduate. The project team is currently evaluating this process, given the changes that Google has announced.

Exceeding the Google Mail quota of 20GB will impact your ability to send and/or receive emails. You can still log in to your Google Mail account, view email, and download files. Once you remove emails so that you are below the 20GB quota for email your account will go back to operating normally. 

Note that if your primary affiliation is alumni or retiree your Google Mail quota will be set at your Permanent Baseline Quota – 5GB. Hence, exceeding the Google Mail quota of 5GB will impact your ability to send and/or receive emails. You can still log in to your Google Mail account, view email, and download files. Once you remove emails so that you are below the 5GB quota for email your account will go back to operating normally.