Google Non Profit Storage

[INMEDIT]

Is anyone else on the Google for Non Profits with the 30 GB free storage? How are you overcoming the issue of Google taking away the ability to purchase additional storage space per user? All the Q&A and support documentation says Non Profits should have pooled storage but support tells me it is not implemented. Non Profits do not have the funds to upgrade the entire organization when a handful need additional storage. What have you done to get around this issue?

[RosefromROC]

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/05/pooled-storage-shared-drives-for-google-workspace-bu...

Per the blog link they sent with the email (says Business Starter but I assume the same applies to Non-profit); 

Rollout pace
- Beginning May 15, 2023, new Business Starter customers will have pooled storage by default.
- Pooled storage will start rolling out to existing Business Starter customers on May 22, 2023 and continue over the coming months.
- Shared drives will become available after pooled storage rolls out to all existing Business Starter customers.

[msbmsb]

...or came to their senses 🙂  ...probably was in the works but some technical issues to work out.  Either way, the 100TB shared limit is great!   

Now I just need to deal with an efficient way to import external Basic/individual user files into gWorkspace  ...where we did not give them a Workspace acccount to use so they just shared files from their personal account...

[icrew]

Check out @StephenHind's response on the thread at https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Workspace-Q-A/Change-ownership-in-drive/m-p/599086 for a good way to do that.

[msbmsb]

Thx,  Will check out that post.  But I know our Non-profit workspace account does not allow shared drives 😞 ...that seems to be the most recommended way to do this...

[icrew]

Stephen's suggestion doesn't require Shared Drives, which is kinda neat.

[StephenHind]

@msbmsb as @icrew mentioned Shared Drives are not required and would require a lot of manual work, but Shared Drives are coming to Workspace for nonprofits:

[braverh-IT]

hi checking again if anyone already got it rolled out? i got the email but no indication of when it actually comes live

[icrew]

The only information I've seen/heard is "Pooled storage will start rolling out to existing Business Starter customers on May 22, 2023 and continue over the coming months. " (emphasis mine)

Not through any knowledge, just experience with Google over the years, I'd interpret that as "we're planning to get the roll out finished by the end of 2023"....

Hope that helps, at least a little,

Ian

[JoeDusey]

Hello,

I have a question for those of you that experienced the issue where your personal subscription for additional Google Drive space just stopped renewing. Did you receive any prior notice that the subscription would NOT renew?

I ask because I currently have one user that previously purchased 100 GB of additional space. He currently pays $19.99 annually for that subscription. He received an email on July 10th that his subscription WOULD automatically renew on August 10th. I HOPE that does happen, otherwise he will be in the red and we'll need to scramble as others have already said within this forum thread. 

Thanks,
Joe

[Jack_Casse]

We have several users with expanded storage, and they have been renewing normally.

[braverh-IT]

hi all congratulations pooled storage is released to all non profit accounts 

[EKTrunks]

I’m not seeing it on my account.  How do you know it’s rolled out on yours?

[JoeDusey]

Yes, I can confirm that within "Billing" > "Get more services" > "Google Workspace add-ons" there is an option titled "Google Workspace Additional Storage" that starts at "$300/Bundle of 10TB/month".

HOWEVER, that does not help.

My entire domain of users is only using a little more than 500GB of combined storage. I have a small handful of users that need more storage than the 30GB cap per user. I still do NOT have the ability to raise their individual cap because "Pooled storage" is NOT yet enabled for my nonprofit Google Workspace subscription. 

[ArdenAdv]

In a similar position... will we be able to raise the cap per user above 30GB without purchasing the 10TB add-on?

[braverh-IT]

look in billing get more services and the 2nd option on the left "Google workspace  add ones "

[calcuttarescue]

I don't think this is applicable to us as the note mentions:

"Google Workspace Additional Storage is incompatible with the legacy G Suite offerings. To use Google Workspace Additional Storage, you will need to transition to one of the Google Workspace offerings with pooled storage."

We don't have pooled storage to begin with. Did any of you receive any other mail regarding pool activation apart from the first one mentioning "it will be rolled out soon" ?

[msbmsb]

We started using this (back when it was called gSuite).  We had our storage automatically converted to 100TB pooled a month ago.  I had to do nothing.  It just appeared.  The original email did note that some legacy gSuite (esp with old storage addons) may have problems converting to gWorkspace and Google would reach out separately to those on how to get converted/upgraded.  So if you haven't heard from Google yet, maybe chat up NP support to see what's going on.

[EKTrunks]

This is good info to know! We've also been with them for almost 15 years and have multiple people who have purchased upgraded storage.  I was sitting here thinking everyone was still waiting for Google to roll it out.  Glad you got yours and are able to keep plugging away at your mission!  

I'll definitely be reaching out to NP support.

[Toby-Pratt]

Just throwing this out there that as our NP organization is yet to transition to pooled storage and the 30GB limit is causing many issues for us as our storage is primarily taken up by large quantities of photos on the google photos app that need to be stored until the end of each year.

I would love to hear from a NP that has transitioned to pooled storage (if any) as the 'coming soon' and 'in the coming weeks/months' time frame is extremally frustrating.

Also I have seen plenty of talk about shared drives on google drive as a method on increasing shared storage between multiple users but I can not see how this can be utilized for photo storage in the google photos app.

Thank you

[braverh-IT]

I celebrated too early here yes I can buy storage but the pooled storage is not on yet, so users are still in 30 gb limit, did anyone here get converted to pooled storage?

[calcuttarescue]

 Just to update the group, we have received 100TB pooled storage today! Such a relief. 

We had received information mail about upgrade in June 2023.

[EKTrunks]

Just out of curiosity, how did you find out you had been updated?  Did they send an email or did you just dig into your Workspace account to find out?

Glad you received the update!

[marionmms]

Just chiming in to say that we also are showing 100TB pooled today. I don't recall getting any formal notification -- just been monitoring this thread for a year or more. Thanks for the alert!  🙂

[Jack_Casse]

Also got the notification in June. No update for us yet, but I DID receive an email last week about users with stand alone storage upgrades and what will happen to them. Fingers crossed.

[sinigur]

Same here for our non-profit Workspace. I'm seeing the "100TB" pool as of this morning. I'm not sure where 100TB is coming from, I don't recall reading that amount was going to be granted to non-profits. I had assumed the total pool would be a function of number of active users x 30GB. If that were true, it would seem that non-profits could keep adding active accounts to increase the pool; maybe Google was ahead of that thought and just decided, eh, we'll give them all 100TB to start with. I'm awaiting more formal announcements from them. Today is the first day of promise that I have seen on this front in several months.

[EKTrunks]

Hmm. Curious if the difference is users that had already purchased more space.  I have 4 users with a yearly renewal for more space and haven't received the 100TB upgrade yet.

[ArdenAdv]

wow, 4 months from notification to activation. that is not short. 
I got my notification email last month, so no I suppose I know what to expect. Been waiting on this upgrade for a long time now.

Thanks for sharing!

[EKTrunks]

Where did you look to know you had been upgraded?  I keep checking individual users to see if they still have a limit of 30GB is there a better way to see if we’ve been upgraded?

[marionmms]

I went under admin -> Storage and it shows "1.9 TB of shared 100TB used." Beneath that there is a "manage" link which let me set a per-user limit, or leave unlimited.

[braverh-IT]

I still didn't get it, I'm wondering you guys that got the pooled storage are non profit subscription? or starter edition?

did you get a email first about it? or it just showed up? 

I'm desperately waiting 

[Jack_Casse]

I received yet another email today, as a non-profit workspace admin, about pooled storage. I went through an made sure users with legacy store were moved to an organization unit with increased storage limit(even though this limit doesn't seem to do anything currently). They've been saying "soon" since May, so I dunno.

Dear Administrator,

Our records indicate that your subscription will soon move to pooled storage.

We are letting you know that one or more of your users either:

• Subscribes to a legacy storage add-on, and/or
• Has additional miscellaneous storage increases

[EKTrunks]

Well, it finally happened for me.  Looks like we got the upgrade.  Here are my details:

• nonprofit account 
• 4 users with added storage (I am one of those and just noticed that it didn't cancel itself. I went ahead and canceled the subscription to added storage)
• been a Google Nonprofit subscriber since 2009

[Steph17]

Hi! Our Google storage has not been upgraded. Do I need to cancel the storage subscriptions of my users manually?

[EKTrunks]

Hey Steph,

I was upgraded with active storage subscriptions.  You should be fine to keep those.  

[Steph17]

Finally! We got the upgrade

[phutchison]

Finally happened for us as well.  Thank you everyone for participating in this thread.  It's meant a lot!

We received our one and only email about this announcing pooled storage would be coming on June 21, 2023.  And we waited, and waited.

We had a user getting dangerously close to her limit.  We deleted files / emails.  We deleted more.  Her account was blocked.  We tried to buy more storage plans but they went away months ago (even though we were still being billed for at least one of them with no way to manage it).  We deleted more.  Most of our users are using well under 5 GB, many less than 1 GB, with just three having over 20 GB, so switching to a full-on paid plan for our organization as was suggested by support during my first chat with them was a no go.  Would have happily added a storage plan for the user going over limit if it had still been possible.

I contacted support on three different occasions just to make sure everything was ok and there wasn't a problem, as there was some indication here in this thread and elsewhere that orgs with very old accounts like ours or individual storage plans had experienced issues with the upgrade.

Any who, it's done.  It's working.  We're saved.  Reminds me of waiting on pins and needles for months for my PSLF to go through last fall!

Now, to make sure the two individual storage plans we did have are really cancelled or if we'll be charged for them again.  😉

[sinigur]

@phutchison well said. 👏 👏 

[phutchison]

Our couple of folks who had legacy / individual storage plans received emails a couple days later saying they received a credit for the remaining time that had been paid for by the plans, so that is all wrapped up.  👍👍

[Jack_Casse]

Our storage was finally converted today! Legacy extra storage subscriptions were automatically cancelled. Made sure these users were in an organizational unit that accommodated the extra space ahead of time. We had one that we missed and Google gave her the typical "out of storage" message - but that was it(nothing was deleted). We just popped her into a new unit and she was good to go.