UT will increase UTmail Google storage for current faculty and staff to 20 gigabytes, but student accounts will be limited to 5GB starting Nov. 1.

Information Technology Services sent an email June 2 announcing the increased storage quota for faculty and staff. ITS originally announced that current faculty, staff and student accounts would all be limited to 5GB starting November 2022. Now, only student accounts will be limited to 5GB in the fall. 

Mario Guerra, senior project manager of the Google storage reduction plan, said he had conversations with the Academic Technology Council and found that 20GB was adequate for faculty and staff to use Google Workspace as an instructional tool. Guerra said the student accounts will be limited to 5GB because student tenure is not as long as faculty and staff. 

Guerra said during the upcoming transitional period of switching everyone to Microsoft Office suite, ITS will purchase additional Google licenses to supply the faculty and staff with 20GB of storage. 

“When these quotas are put into place, I think that we’re going to learn a lot about usage,” Guerra said. “We’re going to learn a lot about why students are using Google, what are those use cases and how much space do they need.”

Guerra said ITS will not offer the ability to pay for additional storage under Google UTmail accounts, but students will be able to pull all of their materials into a personal account and upgrade that email account.

Guerra also said students who need a utexas email account should use Outlook, the Microsoft account provided by the University. Students also have 2 terabytes of storage in OneDrive, and SharePoint, meant for collaboration, has 25TB, Guerra said.