Answering that question we all ask; “How do I find out how much storage my Google Workspace for Education account is using?”, or better yet “Who is using up all our storage?”
This post is a follow up post from my previous ramblings about Google Workspace and the changes that have taken place and are being rolled out in April 2021.
In particular the changes in regards to storage and the way this will be managed in the updated version of Google Workspace for education. As a reminder, here are the new storage limits for the Workspace tiers that are rolling out this April.
Education Fundamentals: 100 TB pooled cloud storage
Education Standard: 100 TB pooled cloud storage
Teaching and Learning Upgrade: 100 TB shared + 100 GB per license
Education Plus: 100 TB shared + 20 GB per license
This pooled storage is for your entire domain and thus is becomes even more important to make sure it is used effectively. Let’s jump into our Admin console for Google Workspace and see what we can learn about how our storage is being used.
Admin console
First things first: Navigate to your Admin Console and find the reports tab.
This will be part of the available apps on the front page of your admin console. In case you can’t find it, use the search bar at the top to search for ‘Reports’.
In your reports menu you will see a storage notice in the ‘Highlights’ tab as shown here.
Once you’ve clicked on this you will get a breakdown report of the storage used on your domain, which apps use the most and how much was used in total. This is a great place to check for potential spikes in storage usage.
If you do spot one of these spikes, it might prompt some further investigation, which we’ll look into next. You can also see the type of files that are being added on any given day.
Dive deeper into the user data
In order to get the information about single user usage of the available storage you will have to dive deeper into the user reports.
These can be found on the left hand side where you select User reports -> Accounts.
Next, you’ll want to find the Cog wheel on the right hand side to make sure ‘Storage’ is a selected data point you are going to look at.
Here you select ‘Drive Storage Used’, and if you choose so, can drag and drop it to move it to a different column for easier management.
Now that everything is set up, we can run a filter to find the users who are using up the most storage. Set up a filter for Drive storage used(MB) and use the greater than to set up increments of storage used.
Makes sure you increase the number used, and run the filter again. This way you will have fewer and fewer accounts shown, highlighting the ‘Power users’.
We can now see the users who are using up the most storage.
Remember that any of these reports can be downloaded for use in other application, either as a .csv file or opened directly in Google sheets to do your own analyses.
Important Note on the upcoming changes to Google Workspace:
Google has informed everyone that they are working on some storage specific tools which will hopefully enable us to gain even more control and insight into how much data and content is being stored, where it is being used, and who the heavy users are. In the meantime, dive into the Admin console and start prepping yourselves.