Quick Tips For Reducing Your Berkeley Google Storage

Opportunity

You have a limited amount of storage to use in your Berkeley Google account. To ensure you do not go over limit, use these tips.

1) Check your Berkeley Google Drive storage usage and delete large files

There are two ways to check your Drive storage and identify large files: 

1. From within Drive, choose Storage from the left hand menu. (There is also a cloud icon next to Storage.)

   • By default your files are sorted by size with the largest files on top. 

   • Deleting large files you don’t need is the quickest way to reduce your overall storage. 

Choose Storage from the left hand menu 

2. To see both your overall Berkeley Google storage usage as well as see email, drive, and photos broken down separately go to  https://drive.google.com/settings/storage.

2) Search your Berkeley Google mail for large attachments

• Find emails with large attachments by searching for “has:attachment larger:10MB” (without the quotations) in the mail search field at the top of the page and press Enter.

  • This will identify emails with attachments larger than 10 MB. If this returns too many emails, you can start higher by replacing "10" with a higher number, such as 15 or 20, to find even larger files. 

• Select specific emails and delete them individually or delete all search results in bulk.

• You can use advanced search criteria to find other email you no longer need.

  • Search operators you can use with Gmail

• For more detailed instructions see [KB0015041, Quickly Clean Out Your Berkeley Email and Reduce Your Google Storage]

3) Search your Berkeley Google Drive for unwanted content using advanced search operators

• Use Advanced Search to find files by type, size, or last modified date. 

• Here is a list of search operators: Find files in Google Drive.

• You can also sort your drive files using the Last Modified drop-down. Look for other options under the search bar where you can quickly filter by who owns the files or the type of file. 

Advanced Search and Sort Options

4) Ensure you are not backing up files unnecessarily to your Berkeley Google Drive

• Are you backing up your phone, mobile photos, your desktop, or files to your Google Drive?

  • Check your Google Photos app on your mobile phone and be sure you are not backing it up to your Berkeley Google Drive.

  • If you have Drive for Desktop, be sure you are not backing up or syncing folders from your computer that do not need to be on your Berkeley Google Drive.

  • Learn more about backups in Drive here: Manage & restore your mobile backups in Google Drive.

5) Move departmental or collaborative content from your Berkeley My Drive to a Shared Drive

There are two benefits of storing departmental and collaborative content in a Shared Drive versus your My Drive.

1. The content will not be deleted when you leave Berkeley so it will be available to those who still need it even if you are no longer working or studying at Berkeley.

2. This content will not count towards your Berkeley Google account storage allotment.

Learn more about Shared drives here: Store & share files or folders with Shared drives.