The End of Free Google Storage for Education (theregister.com) 40
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2014, Google made a remarkable offer: anyone with a Google Apps for Education account in the US got unlimited storage for free. The logic was sound at the time. Three years earlier, the tech giant had launched the Chromebook -- cheap, robust and secure, the web-browser-based kit was a natural fit for education. The cloud was its primary storage, so what could be better than making that bigger than any hard disk in a Mac or Windows PC could ever swallow? The idea was that if you catch users when they are young, they're yours for life. The axiom had already been tested by both Apple and Microsoft, with creative types and workers in jobs with sensible shoes respectively. Google played on its own strengths as the first cloud-native platform for everyone. And lo, it was good. Seven years later, Google has killed the deal.
In place of all you can stash, each institution in the scheme was getting a total pool of 100TB to give to student and teacher alike. If they wanted anything more, the cash register was open. For a small primary school with a couple of hundred pupils, this was perfectly adequate. A large science-heavy university could have a single experiment using that much, however. That announcement was a year ago, and gave existing users 18 months of grace, with new users denied the unlimited package from, well, now. Those with experience of academic deadlines won't be surprised that it has taken this long for lots of people to notice.
In place of all you can stash, each institution in the scheme was getting a total pool of 100TB to give to student and teacher alike. If they wanted anything more, the cash register was open. For a small primary school with a couple of hundred pupils, this was perfectly adequate. A large science-heavy university could have a single experiment using that much, however. That announcement was a year ago, and gave existing users 18 months of grace, with new users denied the unlimited package from, well, now. Those with experience of academic deadlines won't be surprised that it has taken this long for lots of people to notice.
Not supricing. (Score:3)
After all I am sure that the total cost to google has risen yearly, given that with a free storage no one ever removes old data either.
It is good that they at least keep a smaller free tier for the smaller schools, but the question then becomes for the bigger schools who will sort though the old data to see what should be deleted to keep the total storage at reasonable size. Or alternatively should they try to find other solutions, but such transitions take quite a long time too.
Re:Not supricing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Free or reduced prices to education has always made big returns. When you grow up using something and learning it all through your education, you continue to use and pay for the same products in your career.
What they didn't on is how many businesses were going to just keep using it for free. I know more than one local company that sets up a free gmail address for each employee.
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Free or reduced prices to education has always made big returns. When you grow up using something and learning it all through your education, you continue to use and pay for the same products in your career.
Citation needed. Technology changes too quickly and people move to newer services. Nobody over about 35 uses anything they used during their education. If it were true in my case I'd still be buying WordPerfect and using Pine for email.
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It is good that they at least keep a smaller free tier for the smaller schools, but the question then becomes for the bigger schools who will sort though the old data to see what should be deleted to keep the total storage at reasonable size.
Does any organization actually do this much? I have run into so many projects and client environments with runaway storage filled with old data. The only thing that seemed to ever motivate them was super long project delays because of it, and with on-premise projects they were all too happy to pay for new storage solutions that baked this data into the new storage (which is usually a function of storage getting cheaper and not really that they're spending a lot more on storage).
Usually the conversation in
Implementation Surprising (Score:2)
The problem with this is that institute limits are impossible to manage. The institute can't decide whose files to delete to get back under quota or whether some individual's files are worth paying the extra capacity for or even if they shoul
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Google management console allows for looking at how much data each user uses in the normal versions. I would assume that the education version is the same.
That does allow the organization to find out who uses what space and then give the departments options to either reduce their use or pay their share and the departments then again can do it to projects and so on.
Yes it is quite a lot of work overall, but such a thing is definitely possible to do.
Google Cloud Storage (Score:2, Insightful)
For 100TB, it seems the regular cost is $1000 per month. I think that's already a fair amount to effectively donate to a school.
For schools that take 100TB to store one scientific experiment, the experiment probably already costs more than that storage, not to mention they're probably already very privileged schools.
Re: Google Cloud Storage (Score:3)
It costs quite a bit to send 100TB back and forth over the internet. One might even be tempted to say: how wasteful.
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100TB over the internal network at a University from a lab is not without problems. Been there done, that got the tee shirt. If you are lucky the cabling between the patch room and the lab is Cat6a and has been correctly terminated and you can use that. There is a *VERY* good chance it is Cat5e, or Cat6 and is unusable for 10GbaseT and will need replacing, or you might want to put in fibre which is a whole other ball game. Then you have to procure switches with 10GbaseT ports because it will almost all be f
what kind of contracts do the schools have? (Score:1)
what kind of contracts do the schools have? and with some STATE schools google may of agreed to terms saying they can't just make an change like this.
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Any school needing to store more than 100TB of data is not going to rely on a free cloud product for it anyway. At that level they will want a Service Level Agreement, and will have their own dedicated backup system. They will likely want a copy of it on-site too, since even with a fast internet connection it's a lot of data to be transferring, and at that scale cloud services charge for network ingress/egress.
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Except that there is likely a lot of accumulation of old no longer needed files and users that are no longer in the school unless they are way better managed than the average system.
Just a few users using 1TB each in a year (as the space was free, there was no need to limit) that are left over and in 10 years you are talking of a large fraction of the 100TB even without the current in use data. Of course finding them is fairly easy if you try (just look at who the large data users are)
Also many of the small
Evil Google Bait-and-Switches Again (Score:2, Insightful)
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They likely won't ever charge for gmail. Gmail is the base for uniquely identifying a user. Your google email is what associates you with your android phone, your search history, and everything else that google needs to sell you to advertisers. If you didn't use gmail, you would be much less likely to be logged into google while doing a search.
That being said, I'm surprised how many people have a primary email address at a domain they don't control. Once upon a time, most people's first email address w
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I'm grandfathered into the old free gmail for business plan with a custom domain. If they ever did start charging or start to suck, I can take my domain and move elsewhere with minimal disruption.
So what you're saying is that you have not been reading the news?! They've been tussling over this for the past month -- the gmail with custom domain (shoveled/bundled into the g suite parentage) is going the way of the do-do, and whatever lineage they'll offer will distinctly *not* possess email as part of the package.
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Still trying to figure out how to change from this. First, I thought I was grandfathered in for life for being part of their beta team. Second, what the hell is the minimum for just having them hosting my email with a custom domain? I've gotten their emails but they seem pretty sketchy on what actions are available.
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Re: Gmail w/ custom domain -- any paid Google Workspace service tier. They released a new "Google Workspace Essentials/Starter" (https://workspace.google.com/essentials/) and their own FAQ says clearly, "If you need custom email, you’ll want to consider Google Workspace, starting at $6 per user per month."
Rumor has it the
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Rumor has it they'll offer a data-porting option from Gmail+custom to Gmail.com (bye bye custom domain) for free before July 2022.
It already exists under settings. It's called "Import mail and contacts" It appears to use pop3 and works with any account not just another gmail account.
You should also be able to use a normal imap/pop3 application to drag folders across.
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Still trying to figure out how to change from this.
Right now the easiest way is with a free Cloudflare account. Set a new free Gmail account, put your domain on Cloudflare, enable its Email Routing [cloudflare.com] service (it's in open beta), and set it to forward your custom address to your new free Gmail account.
To transfer your old e-mails from your old Gapps account, you can use any IMAP e-mail application. Thunderbird, for example. Connect both accounts on it, download all the contents of your Gapp's "All Mail" pseudo-folder locally, then upload them all to your free
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dude - fyi, you're free plan is going away in may or so - you just may have not gotten the email yet
I'm in the same boat and just got my email a week or two ago
I think I'm just going to use a gmail address going forward as having a simple personal domain seems to confuse lots of people...
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: First hit off the crack pipe is free. (Score:2)
I've never got free drugs from a drug dealer, crack included.
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Totally misleading headline... (Score:5, Insightful)
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For a medium size college of say 15k students that's less than 7G per student, which is less than half the individual allocation. They are going to loose such schools.
Google cancelled something? (Score:1)
Standard drug dealer (Score:2)
Get people a sample, make sure they're sufficiently hooked, then jack up the price.
why not base it on enrollment? (Score:2)
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Disk quotas only make sense. Having Google enforce them is a lot better than having a school nag at some student because they have 40TB in their Google Drive. Having to enforce on the institutional level is a lot more difficult.
Get What You Pay For (Score:1)
Because the Google solution is free! Will they support you. No! Will they help you. No! Is it actually good for student learning? Who knows? Will they sell every bit of information on you and your students? Absolutely! Even after saying they wont? Absolutely
100TB NOT enough (Score:2)
Over the course of several year, even small schools will have to delete old stuff -- 100TB is NOT enough. We're being trained to accept that as a matter of course, but it's not cool. The videos of the school plays. The Chorus concerts. The student-made videos. Photos of kids' artwork. etc. These multi-GB files will feel ripe to delete when the system starts nagging that your storage limit is used up.
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For those video files, they'll be reduced to a small fraction of their size of properly recompressed. It's just that no-one usually bothers because storage is free.
caring about data (Score:2)
suddenly (Score:1)