What will the change to storage mean for students?
What will students need to do?
Storage on Google is no longer free or unlimited, therefore, all students must take personal responsibility to delete any data held within Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos and the N&K drives that is not required for your studies including any personal data. We all need to ask ourselves - is our data ROT? ROT stands for: R-Redundant O-Obsolete T-Trivial. Data that is ROT is data that is digital information that the University of Portsmouth is currently storing which has no value to your studies. If your data is ROT – delete! This is a requirement to reduce the quantity of your data – not to find an alternative storage location.
When will the changes take place?
Students who have the largest quantities of storage currently have already been contacted by Library & Information Services to take required steps to significantly reduce their stored data. It is now time for everyone to look at their individual data storage prior to 1st July 2024. Library and Information Services Training Team have provided a useful video to help you to review your storage.
To find out your storage usage, please visit here.
Why are students being asked to review their storage?
The University of Portsmouth partnered with Google in 2012 to offer Google Workspace for Education, which included unlimited cloud storage. However, in 2021, Google announced that there would be strict storage limits imposed on all Higher Education institutions. To stay within the newly imposed pooled storage limits, the University now has a requirement to reduce the data we store in Google to not incur extra financial charges. New storage limits will be implemented to ensure we are cost-effective with our data storage.