(Cloud) Storage Wars: Google Drive for Education goes Unlimited

 If you work at a K-12 or Higher Ed school with Google Apps for Education, you are quietly getting a fall gift from Google: Drive storage will be unlimited for education users within the next few days. Over the last few months, Google and Microsoft have been waging war over cloud apps for the education market, and for the last year Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business (also used to support education clients) had the upper hand with 1 TB of storage per user. Google’s far more popular Apps for Education service has now fired back with unlimited storage per user (still at no cost). Even more appealing to those of us who work with digital audio or multimedia is the per-file cap of 5 TB. 

 

For most users, even Google’s prior limit of 30 GB seemed to be ample. Google Apps users who only use the core Google products (Docs, Sheets, etc.) would be hard-pressed to use even half of that. What many users still don’t realize, though, is that all types of files can be stored in Google Drive, and using Drive to store large files (multimedia, for example) allows cloud backup and web-based access without relying on e-mail or external devices like a flash drive. Furthermore, I believe one of the most under-utilized features of Google Drive is the local client, which installs a folder on your Mac or PC desktop allowing you to access, edit and upload files without having to use the web interface. With unlimited storage and the local client, you could now put your entire hard drive within a Google Drive folder and have complete backup (and web-access), or sync individual project folders to share with your singers, students or department-mates. The large per-file limit will easily accomodate even a full concert recording in HD, meaning that a shared Google Drive folder now becomes an incredibly flexible means of sharing recordings with your ensembles.

 

A standard note of caution for teachers: The TEACH Act and Fair Use Doctrines give you the authority to share copyrighted material with students online as well as in person. That sharing does not extend to sharing the file itself though– you cannot, for example, share a copyrighted file within Google Drive. Anyone you shared it with would be able to download the file itself, which is not covered by the TEACH Act. Uploading your listening library into your new unlimited storage account would be beyond Fair Use.

 

Google announced at the beginning of October that these benefits would roll “over the next few weeks,” and as with many Google updates, they have begun to appear slowly and somewhat at random. If you belong to a school that uses Google Apps for Education, you will soon have unlimited storage in your Google Drive if you don’t already!