Error: Google Drive storage full before finals
AS final projects and exams crowd the minds of students, many at Rider have been left scrambling for a way to study and complete assignments after a sudden chop to their Google Drive storage space.
The problems stem from a decision by Google to change its policy for educational customers, placing a 113-terabyte cap on university cloud-storage accounts when the service used to offer an unlimited amount of storage.
“Because Rider’s consumption of data and storage vastly exceeds this cap, this is the reason for the degradation of services currently,” said Oliver Wendt, Rider’s interim transition chief information officer, in an email to The Rider News. “Rider must lower its consumption back into compliance limits and/or purchase substantially more cloud storage which would be financially challenging to the university.”
Students are now budgeted with 50 gigabytes of space, and those who exceed that number are effectively locked out of their accounts, unable to create new files or even edit old ones.
Most affected by the storage crunch are student photographers and videographers whose work revolves around large file types, as well as juniors and seniors, who have accrued heaps of files in their time at Rider.
Moments before a tutor meeting on April 21, senior public relations major Lauren Van Dyk was met with an unfamiliar error message, stating that she could no longer edit a slideshow she was about to present. Van Dyk, who was about 40 gigabytes over the limit, cleared enough space to meet the storage quota, but the restrictions on her account weren’t lifted for another day and a half.
“I had to move all my stuff into a personal Google Drive,” said Van Dyk. “Nobody wants to do that. … For the amount of money that we spend to go here, we should get more storage.”
Rider’s OIT Technical Director, Timothy Burger, sent out a universitywide email on April 24 that urged students to undergo a “digital spring cleaning” to cut down on the university’s total storage.
“We need every member of the community to take a close look at your individual Rider Google Drive folder as well as any shared drives that you are the owner of,” said Burger in the email. “While each of us may only have a few bits and bytes of data that can be cleaned up, in the end it adds up if we all do our part.”
According to Burger, OIT has already relocated its larger files in an attempt to abide by the new limit, and will be working with the university’s other departments to do the same.
Burger also stated in the email that OIT wants to get the university under the limit so it has time to finish migrating data to an alternative cloud-storage platform.
According to Wendt, Rider’s current data consumption was about 198 terabytes, 85 terabytes over Google’s new limit, as of April 25. To decrease the total number, Rider’s Office of Information Technologies (OIT) has started using Microsoft365, moving large files into SharePoint Document Libraries.
Rider will not move away from Google Drive entirely, as services like Gmail are an essential part of its communication, according to Wendt. Instead, the university will look into a “hybrid approach,” adopting an additional service that complements Google Drive.
