Google Workspace: Change to storage limit

This page was last updated on Monday 27 March 2023.

Imperial’s alumni email accounts are provided by Google Workspace for Education. When the accounts were introduced, they came with unlimited storage, but in February 2023 Google implemented a restriction of 100TB of pooled storage across all users. With a large alumni community like ours, 100TB does not stretch very far, so we have been forced to introduce a storage limit of 1.5GB per account to ensure fairness for all alumni and to enable us to continue to offer alumni email accounts. 

Please ensure you review your storage use by Friday 14 April 2023 and delete unnecessary files to avoid disruption to your service.

How to review your storage use and delete unnecessary files:

  1. To review how much storage you use and delete large or unnecessary files in Drive, go to Drive Storage. 
  2. To review and delete large or unnecessary files in shared drives, go to shared drives.
  3. To search for and delete large or unnecessary emails, follow the instructions for Gmail in Manage files in your Google Drive storage.
  4. If you need to keep any files that don't fit in your Imperial alumni account, you can export an archive of your Drive, Gmail, and Photos data with Google Takeout. Then delete unneeded files, messages, and attachments and empty your trash to free up storage space. Learn how to download your data into an archive.

Below are some more links that we hope will be helpful in managing your Google account:

Please understand that this change to your storage limit is caused by a new policy introduced by Google. This is not a decision that Imperial College London or the Alumni Relations team can influence. 

We appreciate that this may have a big impact upon how you use your alumni account and would like to apologise once again for the inconvenience.