back to article Users sound off as new Google Workspace for Education storage limits near

Educational users of Google Workspace will soon be facing a new storage policy that limits the free tier to 100TB shared between all users at a site, and some are expressing their dissatisfaction with the change. Google Workspace for Education, formerly G Suite for Education, is Google's offering for schools and universities. …

  1. mark l 2 Silver badge

    We have seen a similar thing happen last year with the unlimited photo storage on Google Photos being withdrawn and replaced with just 20GB.

    Don't rely on Google or any other free service as your only option as they can pull the rug out from you at anytime and your then forced to either spend time and money to move to somewhere else or cough up whatever amount of money they are demanding to keep the status quo.

    Google will be pulling more of these sort of things in the future as their ad revenue drops so the are looking for other ways to make money from their userbase.

    1. katrinab Silver badge
      Megaphone

      In the case of Google, don't rely on it even if it is a paid-for service. They can still pull the rug from you at any time.

    2. IceC0ld

      I have one of those Google phones :o)

      and my pictures get pulled to their servers, and I cannot find a way to drag ALL of them off, and load them to my own home storage. I do NOT wish to do them one at a feckin time ffs. Maybe hoping some here will know what buttons to push ?

      any or anyones buttons tbh :o)

      but back to the issue in hand, and I agree, no one was ever going to offer unlimited for ever ......

      and why TF are universities trying to do it as a one off plan ?

      do it the proper way, hybrid, put it all on local resources, have local admin, so you can go shout shouty stuff at them when things don't work as you thought it should .......

      and then drop the essential* stuff, onto cloud in a backup / recovery option

      *essential by definition may vary dependant on which side of the tech business you are form

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        and my pictures get pulled to their servers, and I cannot find a way to drag ALL of them off, and load them to my own home storage. I do NOT wish to do them one at a feckin time ffs. Maybe hoping some here will know what buttons to push ?

        I think Google Takeout does it. You could write a script to wget/curl all the URLs in a json file that it generates for you.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Use rclone.

      3. Altrux

        Photo archiving

        I just go to photos.google.com, download a great stack of them (which arrives as a ZIP file), then delete the same stack from the web interface. Job done. They go into trash then get auto-deleted after 30 days. But photos in trash don't seem to count towards your quota, which immediately goes up when you press delete!

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        If you connect your phone as a drive you can download your photos with any tool - especially if the phone follows the DCF standard for photo storage (the "DCIM" directory). If the phone supports SD cards you can also save photos there and then import them directly from the card, which is usually faster then going through the phone OS.

        Of course that works if you don't want to keep several hundreds gigabytes of terabytes on the phone.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      There is a use case here of setting up a cheap (well a few thousand) rough and ready, 5//6 disk (5x18TB) RAID 5/6 on-site encrypted 10Gbps Networked Synology NAS or True NAS (faster open hardware) as a form of sync'd glacial back up per institution, just to allow them to shop around, if Google attempt further price hike attempts by lowering limits. Clearly it depends on the majority of the data being stored, but still.

      Cloud Storage is both resilient but also short-sighted in terms of costs, lock-in has always been an issue, but the pandemic, put that issue to the back of people's minds, now it's centre stage again with rising inflation and limited budgets.

    4. thondwe

      Same just happened with the removal of the "Legacy" F.O.C. workspace.

      But dependency on any piece of I.T. is at the mercy of risk of change. Supplier's change stuff, disappear from the market (i.e. get bought by Microsoft), open source developers move on to other projects, leaving orphans.

      Bigger the dependency, bigger the risk, and harder any migration/mitigation...

      Suspect this move by Google is to try and get money from the big U.S. Universities as they seem $$$ being spent with Microsoft and they're making NO money... Could hit countries like Wales though, we have a single Google tenant (and a Microsoft Tennant!) for all schools in Wales...

  2. Pascal

    Nobody should have entered in "free, infinite storage" agreement with Google and not know this would come to an end at some point.

    The fact that there are entire universities that rely on that for their data storage and are at a loss as to what to do with their petabytes of data all of a sudden is however absolutely insane. Then on top of it to have this huge blindspot where this deadline announced a year in advance is causing a stir *now*. Think of all the potentially insanely critical research data that is just entrusted to Google, with no idea of what their backup plans / recovery procedures are.

    1. Natalie Gritpants Jr

      I would suggest that the insanely critical research petabytes better belongs on a local RAID system (possibly with cloudy backup in case of fire). Keeping it in the cloud will slow your access to it.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. DS999 Silver badge

        A lot of research data will never be read again

        They keep it around so their work can be reproduced or built upon, but most of it is worthless. The problem is, you can't tell what is worthless so you have to keep it all.

        Only the active part you are actually working with needs to be on a RAID, the rest can be on tape with a copy sent to Iron Mountain or similar.

        1. TRT Silver badge

          Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

          Argh! I want to downvote you for saying data are worthless. But I can't because you speak the truth!

        2. Phones Sheridan Silver badge

          Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

          "The problem is, you can't tell what is worthless so you have to keep it all"

          Back in the noughties I worked as IT support to a pharmaceutical company, They too complained that they never had enough space for raw data and that they NEEDED everything. I used to tell them to create a Zipfile from the raw data, and compare the sizes afterwards. The resulting zip file could be 0.1% of the size of the original files. I'd then point out that if maths can determine which data is pretty much redundant, then I'm sure they have the skills to do the same much more accurately. You could see the light-bulb go on inside their heads when it twigged most raw data is incredibly repetitive and can be discarded if you look for and identify it.

          A quick example, a single sided DVD can hold just over 6 copies of the human genome. If you zip that, it will span 3 floppies.

          The problem you can't solve so easily is the user that sticks a 1gb video into his Powerpoint presentation, and distributes a copy to everyone.

          1. Wellyboot Silver badge

            Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

            >>>the user that sticks a 1gb video into his Powerpoint presentation, and distributes a copy to everyone.<<<

            The BOFH knows how to solve that one!

            Admit it, We've all felt that way about users at some point :)

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

          You never know what could come in handy. For example to study the expression of certain genes, researchers buy standard cassettes which are specific for the tissue type they have. These cassettes have hundreds of different protein tests printed on them. So long as the cassette you buy has the one or two protein assays you are interested in, that's the one you buy and use. You get protein assays for 100s of things you aren't interested in.

          BUT

          During COVID when many scientists were sat at home with lab work on pause and wondering about this new disease, news came out that the virus gets inside cells using a particular doorway in the cells called ACE2. It just so happened that this was made up of proteins that were part of a standard cassette. So within days researchers were able to robustly say which body tissues at what stage of development would be targets for the virus. It was found that smell receptors abd neurones didn't have that receptor. All the speculation about Covid attacking brain cells was shown to be unfounded though the effects could be explained if you looked at the blood supply to the nerve cells and smell receptors. As soon as this was known groups were able to virtually get together and pool their knowledge to produce a hypothesis that explained loss of smell and taste.

          All using data that was 'worthless' and collected just in passing, as a byproduct of the process.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

            depends what sort of data it is. An old lab I used to work at had around 3Pb onsite, but most of this was model outputs so you didn't really need it just have back up of the models and rerun them to create the data. Current Uni where I work I have just migrated 27Tb of data from on prem in to Azure Archive Tier this is gene sequence data

            1. hoola Silver badge

              Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

              Whilst I can see why they may have done that, good luck in ever needing to get it back again.

              The read costs for that tier are astronomical, bluntly it would have been better off on tape. I know that education gets some preferential pricing however the discounts on subscriptions are nowhere nears as generous as institutions used to get. We looked at this for shuffling around 500TB or stale data off our storage and it simply was not worthwhile.

              List prices are just that but at sub 10p for everything else and £6 for archive reads/10k ops puts some perspective on things.

              Source

              https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/storage/blobs/

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

                I just follow orders! Data was sitting on an old w2k8r2 server that needed to be decommed so needed shifting, User is under strict orders NOT to touch the data for 180days otherwise he'll be charged an early release fee

                1. Captain Scarlet
                  Trollface

                  Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

                  Ah yes, its great that noone listens. The ultimate Trolls, they then bugger off to some new job just as the shit hits the fan.

                2. TechnicalVault

                  Modelling is fun

                  We faced similar challenges at the Sanger Institute same data, but much larger scale. We had to implement a few policies to make people behave:

                  - No legacy BAM files for archiving. Same data 100GB BAM or 30GB CRAM, lossless compression, easy choice.

                  - All sequence data is archived to ENA/EGA public archiving at the point of creation, policy is added later (it's not visible until that is added). Funder requirement that happens to ensure there's a separate copy with another organisation that is unlikely to be deleted.

                  - No going off on your own with a cloud service. Clouds usually give you an unlimited spend allowance, and make it hard to watch how you spend, we have a limited budget. We have a cloud budget, you put in a light weight budget proposal before you go dancing off. You blow the budget? You're going to be explaining it to the rest of the scientific faculty not us.

                  - Models built to show the costs over time of various storage options before we make big decisions. It's amazing how many people miss the lil gotchas, like "big fee for taking more than 10% of the data out of storage".

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Yes, we're back to 'edge computing', the current buzz word for old ways of doing things, using hybrid models, placing the necessary infrastructure where the data is processed, i.e. on premises, for data intensive tasks.

    2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      "Think of all the potentially insanely critical research data that is just entrusted to Google, with no idea of what their backup plans / recovery procedures are."

      I was thinking of what Google will be going with all that space used that is above the new 100TB limit if the researchers haven't moved it by the deadline. Will they allow read-only access for a time so it can be moved, or just cut them off at the knees?

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Free storage on the old "best effort, in the spare time we have, after taking care of paying customers, and before beer-o'clock" basis.

      Personally I can't fault Google for this. They have paying customers, and you aren't them.

      Google has legal obligations to make and maximise profits, just like the university probably has some statutory obligation to not lose all it's research.

      One of them seems to be trying to meet it's obligations.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge
        1. Wellyboot Silver badge

          No they don't have to, but the bosses stay in place longer when they do

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Does that include all those huge "startups" like Uber who have either yet to make a profit or have only just started to make a profit after burning through huge amounts of VC and other investors cash?

    4. Tom 7

      It's part of the disable the user so you can screw them over as a business method. The real cost to a company/institution of running a 100G data store is quite minimal given the security settings will need to be there for other parts of the infrastructure and setting up co-operative off site encrypted backups really shouldn't be too difficult amongst educational sites. But once those skills are gone - as in UK councils etc, the costs can hiked a couple of orders of magnitude or more.

      Not sure whether "suckered" or "LOOOOOOSER" is the correct term here.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The fact that there are entire universities

      unfortunately, it's quite common in all walks of life, i.e. savings NOW, we-will-think-about-potential-problems LATER... Ironically, the cost of the later-solutions usually crush the current savings, but... see above :(

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The fact that there are entire universities

        Though you often want to try different approaches for yourself at zero or minimal cost. And temporary often becomes permanent.

      2. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: The fact that there are entire universities

        Oh yes, as is often the case, this is not a new thing and existed long before there was any such thing as IT in any modern sense.

        Visit any city and there will be buildings ( especially schools in my experience ) built on the cheap with the expectation that they'll be good for 20-30 years. But 30-50 years on the buildings are still in use, extremely expensive to maintain and are starting to fail. Renovating them is prohibitively expensive. There's no funding to replace them and even if there was there's nowhere to store the kids or patients or families or.... etc... for they years it would take to demolish the old one and build a new one.

        But whether it's storage for bytes or kids it's the same game of pass-the-exploding-parcel, with the people who set it up usually having made sure they're off to pastures new well before the ticking stops.If it's to a new institution that won't matter, because they'll be able to blame the previous incumbent.

  3. Filippo Silver badge

    I don't particularly like Google, but in this case I'm finding it hard to blame them. Hundreds and hundreds of terabytes for free? Nice to have, by all means use it, but have an alternative already researched and ready to roll. Even if (if!) the Google guys who set this up had all the best intentions in mind, people change, policies change. You can't rely on what's effectively corporate charity and trust it to last forever.

    I might maybe blame Google for a bait'n'switch, grabbing people with a free-but-unsustainable offer and then suddenly asking for money, except they've given one year advance notice - that's plenty, plenty of time for users to find, trial and acquire other solutions, and it's not like Google has a monopoly on cloud storage.

    1. Pascal

      For Google this was never about corporate charity, this was a well thought plan to get students used to their toolset - hopefully driving more future use case towards them instead of Microsoft 365. Seems it just ended up costing them more than anticipated.

  4. JimmyPage Silver badge
    Mushroom

    What the difference between drug dealers and google ?

    Fuck all, would appear to be the answer/ Neither gives a shit about the law, and both business models rely on getting users hooked.

    1. Alumoi Silver badge

      Re: What the difference between drug dealers and google ?

      Replace Google with $big_corp and you're on to something.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmmm

    Interesting. I wonder if Google is feeling some sort of internal pinch. They're also killing the free Google Apps For Domains/Workspaces in July. Plus the Google photos thing. Makes one wonder if everything in Willy Wonka World isn't all rainbow raindrops and chocolate rivers of late.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Hmmm

      Maybe they are paying huge chunks of cash to their parent, Alphabet and are seeing their coffers beginning to drain? Google like, for example Starbucks UK, might be paying enormous sums to "licence" the Google name, trademarks and other IP from Alphabet and so make little to no profit, therefore pay no taxes. Alphabet may have just upped the licencing fees so Google needs more cash flow.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hmmm

      Probably they have seen new sign ups decreasing, so it was time to start to monetize the captured cattle, now that moving to alternatives could become more expensive or difficult.

    3. Barry Rueger

      Re: Hmmm

      I wonder if Google is feeling some sort of internal pinch.

      No. Google has done this over and over with various products, which is why I trust them with nothing of consequence and back up the rest.

  6. Jonny Quest
    Pint

    MS Is Loving This

    Looks like MS sales peeps will be salivating on migrating these scorned users.

    From their O365 Education site:

    Unlimited personal cloud storage for qualifying plans for subscriptions of five or more users, otherwise 1 TB/user. Microsoft will initially provide 1 TB/user of OneDrive for Business storage which admins can increase to 5 TB/user. Request additional storage by contacting Microsoft support. Storage up to 25 TB/user is provisioned in OneDrive for Business. Beyond 25 TB, storage is provisioned as 25 TB SharePoint team sites to individual users.

    src: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/academic/compare-office-365-education-plans?activetab=tab:primaryr2#coreui-contentrichblock-74nfo1y

    1. drand

      Re: MS Is Loving This

      Yeah but then you have to use SharePoint - yuck. And I would have little faith in MS not pulling the same con a year down the road.

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: MS Is Loving This

      Unlimited personal cloud storage for qualifying plans for subscriptions of five or more users, otherwise 1 TB/user.

      Sounds very similar: terms and conditions apply and can be changed at any time… Basically no company can afford to provide unlimited anything (except perhaps ads and bullshit for free). All you can eat offers almost invariably lead to some kind of restriction because 5% of the users tend to use 95% of the resources.

      Google's approach is clumsy but understandable: through the offer it's got a much better idea of what kind of storage requirements universities have. And for many universities even a subscription service is likely to end up cheaper and quicker than getting the overworked IT department to provide something similar, especially if the data is supposed to be available for other users. However, those T&Cs should always be considered and you should always have an exit plan in case that becomes necessary (for financial, regulatory, etc. reasons) including paying for Google to dump that data onto SSDs as TB/PB transfers over the internet are not advisable.

      In summary, for any kind of aaS: egress is the biggest risk.

  7. Pirate Dave Silver badge
    Pirate

    Tangentially related, MS is twisting the knife on Google's decision to axe the G Suite legacy accounts.

    https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/microsoft-365/262606/microsoft-offers-g-suite-legacy-customers-a-deal

    1. katrinab Silver badge
      Meh

      I only really use mine for YouTube.

      I'm copying my channel subscriptions across to a gmail account, but it is recommending me a load of videos I've already watched now.

  8. Crypto Monad Silver badge

    "assuming that Google would offer unlimited free storage forever"

    If you give people a bigger dustbin, it will still always be full.

    If you give them an infinite-sized dustbin, they will never empty it.

  9. Marty McFly Silver badge
    Childcatcher

    Just like a drug dealer...

    ...the first hit is free. Then you start to pay.

    Got a letter from my Alma matter about how Screwgoogle is forcing them to change everything they have had in place for years. Not really "forcing", I guess. Just making them pay for what Google previously gave away under an orgy of philanthropic goodness.

    Yeah, exactly like a drug dealer.

    1. martinusher Silver badge

      Re: Just like a drug dealer...

      They got it free just long enough to dump their in-house equipment and expertise.

      Universities are businesses these days, anyway. They should not expect charity. They're fools for believing that its being given to them.

      1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

        Re: Just like a drug dealer...

        Very true, but how does an IT department argue with the top of the University when Google is "free" and they are asking for ~£1M budget for replacement storage arrays?

        Yes, they (top brass) are fools for believing it, but you can see how this works out.

        And now that Google has pulled this change, the university looks at the required capital expenditure and cost to re-hire the missing IT support it jettisoned and starts writing cheques to Google. Or perhaps as likely, just lets the users fight like a bag of ferrets on how has to delete stuff to fit the overall limits now.

        1. Wellyboot Silver badge

          Re: Just like a drug dealer...

          I agree, bit of a rant here..

          Having a centralised properly staffed on-prem cloud service* as a cost centre with the various depts simply paying for their share of base costs and whatever storage requirement they need is best practise in business.

          IT in any large educational establishment should be operating along business lines because the ongoing operational decisions are the same and it's still a cost centre just like all the other background services (everyone likes getting the correct pay on time).

          Having a PHD means you can perform the top level of your field, leave the plumbing to someone who knows how.

          I constantly have to remind people that there's always a reason behind 'free' services.

          *how the on-prem relates to the global cloud is a service issue and should be arranged so that migration is planned for.

  10. keithpeter Silver badge

    Eligibility

    When I read the headline, I was thinking of schools in the pandemic &c here in the UK and thought OK 100Tb might do for homework upload and all at a stretch (2000 pupils in an 8 form entry secondary school = something like 10Gb/student + teacher accounts, class videos and all)

    University researchers using the system to dump out petabytes of research data does strike me as being cheeky: perhaps research grant applications should include data lifecycle plans and salary for programmer(s) in these days of reproducible research?

    I also scanned the eligibility requirements: geared to US. I'm guessing UK is basically for .ac.uk and .sch.uk domains. I'm wondering if there is a 'community organisation' route to eligibility akin to the US 'homeschool coops'?

    Anyone got any direct UK experience?

    1. Chz

      Re: Eligibility

      Speaking from a UK institute of higher learning...

      We give the students 1GB off an internal NAS and staff 10GB, but encourage them to use OneDrive instead. Once enough of them are on that, the plan is to get rid of the on-site NAS and associated antivirus and ancillary kit around it. The disk itself isn't all that expensive, it's running it. The NAS is also used for everything that should have moved to SharePoint years ago and hasn't, so I suspect it's going to hang around for some time.

      Individual departments generally handle their own storage for research and whatnot. There's zero central planning around it. Some of them may be using Google for all I know; I don't really care. I do know the CS school has its own proper NAS, as does the AV department because they host it in our DC like they should. Anything else is out there on its own in a closet or something.

      1. ibmalone

        Re: Eligibility

        Yes, investigators are to a large degree independent and tend to compare getting a TB of backed-up NAS storage to buying a TB external drive. At the other end of the scale, there's a tendency for central infrastructure to want to drag people in with solutions that don't always work for them, which hollows out the pool of expertise for departments to help each other. Services like OneDrive and Google can actually provide more convenient services, but you have no control over any changes they make (our university pays for OneDrive and other MS services, at institute level infrastructure has largely reduced to desktop and network support, though there are still departments that have their own computing facilities, and we have decent storage infrastructure still due to what we do).

      2. Charlie Clark Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Eligibility

        I really like your post except for this sentence

        The NAS is also used for everything that should have moved to SharePoint …

        I have never found SharePoint to be useful or reliable. And, again, how can you be sure you'll ever get your data out of it?

    2. ibmalone

      Re: Eligibility

      perhaps research grant applications should include data lifecycle plans and salary for programmer(s) in these days of reproducible research?

      This is in a process of change. For a long time grants have provided equipment costs, but not wanted to pay for overheads. But the data you generate during your research has a cost for storage (and possibly for processing) that could be high depending on what you're doing. The result was it was easy to buy a new PC or a hard drive to put your data on, it was not easy to contribute towards a departmental NAS or a cluster. It's starting to become better as funding institutions recognise that these are not just administrative overheads but essential services that support the research, and becoming a bit better at accepting costs towards those things (similarly for statistical support).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Eligibility

        spot on the opex and capex, used to see it all the time. You 'd also have similar with support contracts. Boffins buy expensive bit of kit with grant money, has a few years warranty and support with it. 3 years time out of warranty so no more updates for analysis software etc Hence you land up with bits of kit connected to old boxes running XP because the boffins haven't factored in the cost of support and new software updates to enable it to run on modern PC's.

        1. keithpeter Silver badge
          Windows

          Re: Eligibility

          @Chz, @ibmalone, @Charlie, @Anonymous

          Thanks for taking the time to reply.

          @Chz: if any of the departments/groups have managed to get separate Google Workspace oganisations recognised in your University (and so multiple 100Tb allocations with different namespaces for users &c) I think many might find that useful information. PS Liking sending the students off to OneDrive

          @ibmalone: glad to hear that the idea that data has a life beyond the project and is a deliverable in its own right is at least being thought about

          @Charlie: Sharepoint has its moments speaking as an end user. I like the especially like the OFSTED proximity function (3 day notice of inspection received => authentication becomes unavailable for 12 hours or so, never fails :-)

          @Anonymous: aha, yes I recognise that one from four decades ago (not winXP then of course...)

          If anyone else has managed to get a Google Education/Workspace account recognised for an org that is not a school/University but is demonstrably a non-commercial org working in education I'd be interested in a pointer.

  11. Potemkine! Silver badge

    What did they expect?

    That should be a lesson for all the ones removing their on premise IT thinking they'll gain money. Reality is, they become hostages and will at a moment or another have to pay a huge ransom. At that moment, the boards who decided to destroy their local IT will probably be changed by another one, so 1) the former won't have to suffer any consequence and 2) the latter will accuse the former and won't be held responsible either.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What did they expect?

      Uni I work at has moved lots in to Azure, not too much on prem now, maybe 180 VM's and some faculty kit, double that in Azure. Trouble is like you say once you're locked in you're in, I wonder how many businesses have gone the other way from cloud to on prem!? Last years Azure spend £400k+ That's just azure subscriptions doesn't include o365

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Recent history too...

    The fire at The OVH SBG2 data center in Strasbourg, France in March 2021.

    “We have a major incident on SBG2,” OVH CEO Octave Klaba tweeted Tuesday evening. “Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2. The whole site has been isolated which impacts all services in SGB1-4. We recommend to activate --> your <-- Disaster Recovery Plan.”

    The last sentence is key, if all else fails with your cloud provider, the responsibility still lies with you to have a secondary backup, no one else. Remember that, if you remember anything from this article.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Google are not the bad guys here ...... 'really' ... not this time .... honestly !!!

    I cannot find google at fault here as the 'Free' storage was never promised to last for ever.

    Basic 'Common sense' would tell you that there will come a time when google will change the rules.

    Why do people think a corporation will fund a 'free' service for ever !!!???

    Anything provided for free is ultimately some kind of loss leader.

    When the losses get large enough the rules will change ..... Tech Mega Corps are not there to serve your needs for free, they are there to make money !!!

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We asked Google for an explanation, and it simply pointed us to its original blog post

    out of interest, do you think Google response came from a live person, or a bot? Or, perhaps, it doesn't matter, given their f... off response

  15. TheProf
    Facepalm

    Google Workspace for Education storage limits

    For some reason I've got Ike and Tina Turner's 'Nutbush City Limits' running through my mind.

  16. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

    For me it is a sign that the universities are de-skilling

    Once upon a time we might have expected universities to develop their own software and use it. There are good examples of this - Cyrus at Carnegie Mellon, Exim at Cambridge, to name just a couple. Now, these same universities full of bright minds, have fallen into the 'buy it not build it' trap. Much of the damage from deindustrialisation in the UK 30 years ago is still evident today. A company that can make 1 inch screws can probably make 2 inch screws. A company that can buy 1 inch bolts can only buy in 2 inch screws. And now we have it with universities - buy in the services not build them.

    The two most powerful economies in the world are China and Germany, precisely because they both make things. If we lost 10,000 bankers from the UK today nobody but the cocaine dealers in the City of London, expensive restaurants and hookers, etc, would notice.

    1. VTAMguy

      Re: For me it is a sign that the universities are de-skilling

      This is exactly what happened at a large flagship New England state university campus where I worked before I got the hell out of there. The place changed from having a core group of -very- technical people who could program and deploy systems into a place where the specialty has become signing outsourcing contracts. There are a few actual technical people left to maintain the authentication systems, Shib, etc, but there aren't any real systems programmers and everyone else has titles like 'web specialist', whatever that is. They have chosen to de-skill and now the department is incapable of developing anything new on its own, and they seem to like it that way. But now they are going to be receiving invoices from Google and Microsoft for something which they considered would be free forever. I laugh. TANSTAAFL.

    2. VicMortimer Silver badge
      Flame

      Re: For me it is a sign that the universities are de-skilling

      Universities have absolutely no business outsourcing ANYTHING. Outsourcing IT is absolutely inexcusable for an organization that should absolutely without question have the in-house expertise to handle it, and should in fact be using that expertise not only to manage their own systems but teaching the next generation how to do it.

      Universities that get hit with this deserve every bit of pain they have coming.

  17. 9Rune5
    Mushroom

    We only had 4MB in my day

    Courtesy of the very first BOFH story (http://www.lysator.liu.se/jokes/bofh/bofh1-11.html):

    "Well, let's see, you have 4 Meg available"

    "Wow! Eight Meg in total, thanks!" he says pleased with his bargaining power

    "No" I interrupt, savouring this like a fine red, room temperature "4 Meg in total"

    "Huh? I'd used 4 Meg already, How could I have 4 Meg Available?"

    I say nothing. It'll come to him.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    current UK Uni that I work at spent nearly £200k on storage in Azure last year, it'll be more this year

  19. jqb

    Free Isn't.

    No one should trust "free", or associate it with "forever".

    A couple hypotheticals:

    Google Cloud of which Education is a part, is a money-losing division of the larger Alphabet Corp. Alphabet is profitable, but should it have a few bad financial reports, you can bet investors will be screaming to spin off money losing divisions.

    Unlikely, but Alphabet itself could become an acquisition target. Should it be purchased, the new entity could abrogate any prior agreements that were "free".

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Should have gone to O365 for education which has limits but they scale per user. Way better product suite too.

    1. Pirate Dave Silver badge
      Pirate

      Unless MS has changed it in the past 3 years (since I left EDU), schools with Volume Licenses for Windows/Office got O365 licenses for "free" as part of their annual sacrifice. And MS makes the volume licenses very, very affordable for college/university use. I was beyond shocked when I got a job in Manufacturing and saw how very hard MS screws corporate customers, especially considering how frequently they roll out some new back-end change that fucks things up for a day or two. Hard to complain in EDU when it was "free", but a royal PITA in corp when we're paying that much money for continuously broken services.

  21. Terry 6 Silver badge

    "Google does not offer users the option to just purchase extra storage,"

    With that line comes the sign posting that a free offering was never a long term intention. Else they'd cover the stated increased costs of hosting so many user institutions by charging for the excess rather than mandating a full paid subscription.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If you're not paying, whoever is paying gets to set the rules. In this case, Google.

    Rather entitled attitudes amongst the professors and schools doing the complaining. They're effectively griping that Google won't give them unlimited free storage money in perpetuity.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Just as a note, I pay for my Google services for my little business. Mainly for more reliable email hosting than I was getting elsewhere. But it is a paltry $10/month, and provisions far more than I normally need, despite having years of data in my shared archives that got moved over from Microsoft's dwindling capacity.

      Yes, I'd rather trust Google than Microsoft. Boils down to whose technology I trust more.

      I leave ethics and morality up to the universe and to the talking heads who speak on behalf of the world's religions. It is all about posturing and show, anyhow, and admins on the servers in my worlds have always been able to see everything I was doing, so things are still "status quo" as they've been for the past 30 years or so...

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like