Overview of Google Storage Limit Alerts / Banners

A knowledge base article about Overview of Google Storage Limit Alerts / Banners provided by the UC Berkeley IT Service Hub - Knowledge Portal

As of January 24th, 2023 all UC Berkeley accounts have a quota applied. The initial blue banner image shown below is notifying you that this change has been made. Google automatically alerts account holders when a quota is applied, and also when the account is approaching or at the storage limit. Quotas cannot be removed or revoked. For more information about this change and the Google Cost Reduction project, including future changes and more details about quotas, please visit the Google Project webpage.

banner with text your google workspace administrator has enabled an individual storage limit

Quota Warning Banners for Individual and SPA Accounts

When your account’s storage is between 80% and 100% full, notifications will be visible in Drive, Photos, and the Drive for desktop app to inform you.
In Google Drive, when you click Manage Storage, you will notice the following banners when 80% and 100% full:

A banner stating storage is low 20% is left of your available storage.

A red banner stating storage is full.

In Google Drive, when a collaborator opens a Google file type (e.g., Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.) that you own, they will notice a banner notification indicating that the account who owns the file is over storage.
In Google Drive, the following will be displayed at the bottom of the left-side navigation menu when storage is 100% full:

A red banner stating storage is full, and a manage storage button.

In the Google Drive for desktop app, you will notice the following desktop notifications when storage is 80% and 100% full:

A text box stating Google Workspace storage is almost full.

A text box stating Google Workspace storage is full.

Currently, you will not receive email notifications for storage notifications, and nothing will display in Gmail to indicate you are near/at your storage limit.
If you attempt to upload a file to Drive that will cause you to exceed the limit, the file upload will fail, and you will receive a pop-up notice.

Shared Drives

When your shared drive’s storage is between 80% and 100% full, banner notifications will be visible at the top of the shared drive to inform you. These banners will appear for every member of the shared drive (Managers, Content Managers, Contributors, Commenters, and Viewers) but not for anyone who has individual shared access on a subfolder or file within the drive.
In the shared drive, you will notice the following banner notifications when storage is between 80% and 100% full:

Managers and Content Managers view:

Almost full

Note: This banner will turn from yellow to red when the shared drive is 90% full.

Full

Contributors, Commenters, and Viewers view:

Almost full

Contributors, Commenters, and Viewers will not see any banner notifications until the shared drive is 90% full.

Full

Individually shared collaborators on subfolders and/or files view:

Collaborators shared at the subfolder or file level will not see any banner notifications when storage is almost full or full.

Every member of the shared drive and every account who has individual shared access to subfolders or files stored in the drive will receive errors when trying to move, create, upload, or copy content into the shared drive when the storage is full or if the item they are trying to move/create/upload/copy will cause the storage to exceed the limit.

Error when attempting to move content into the drive (from My Drive or another shared drive) - appears in the lower-left corner of the screen:

A grey pop up box stating Error moving files or folders

Error when attempting to create a new Google file type (i.e., Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, etc.) in the drive. This error will appear in every Google file type created - appears after clicking New > Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/etc.:

A screenshot of a Google doc with an alert stating something went wrong.

Error when attempting to upload a file to the drive - appears as a pop-up after uploading:

Error message stating Item can't be uploaded, it's too large and there's not enough space.

Error when attempting to copy-paste a file into the drive - appears as a pop-up after copy-pasting:

An error box stating item can't be copied, it's too large or there's not enough space.

All members and collaborators will still have access to view, comment, and edit (depending on their permission level) all existing files and folders within the shared drive.

You will need to reduce the amount of storage in your account / shared drive below 80% of your limit for the banners to disappear.

For more general information about Google Quotas and the Google Cost Reduction project, including future changes and more details about quotas, please visit the Google Project webpage.

Content from this article was borrowed with generous approval from the University of Michigan.