Princeton to Cut Way Down on Alums’ Free Google Email Storage

Unlimited. Bottomless. Offers like these may seem too good to be true, and they often are. Remember Red Lobster’s bankruptcy-inducing deal of “ultimate endless shrimp”? MoviePass’s misguidedly low-price for unlimited cinema ticket subscriptions? For almost 10 years, the alumni Google email accounts issued by Princeton University also offered an unfathomably expansive quantity of cloud storage.

“Back in 2016,” Wall Street trader Niraj Bhatt ’03 tells PAW by email, “storage was explicitly described as ‘unlimited.’”

That will change Dec. 31 when Princeton’s alumni storage quota will be capped at 22 GB, and any account exceeding the limit will have its contents erased, according to a message the Office of Advancement and OIT sent to alumni.

In the 2000s, Google launched the G Suite for Education program, which offered free data storage to universities, a program that some nicknamed “email for life.” However, in 2021, Google announced it would phase out its program of unlimited storage for college alumni across the country. Universities were forced to comply or purchase additional storage for them, which over the years could cost millions to maintain.

Educational institutions took different approaches to the Google policy change, with some (such Colgate University) ending alumni Gmail accounts altogether. Others complied by offering reduced storage limits, with many becoming far more restrictive than Princeton’s 22 GB. In 2023, the University of Michigan capped alumni accounts at 15 GB, and in October 2024, Columbia reduced alumni account storage to 5 GB.

Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“I was delighted when I found out I could have an alumni Google Drive account with unlimited storage,” Bronwyn Eisenberg ’80, a teacher in Albany, California, told PAW by email. “I loaded over 100 gigs on it. I’m really unhappy that they have now decided to limit us to 22 gigs, forcing me to juggle my files and spend countless hours carefully checking for overlap and moving files to my other drive.”

Princeton began issuing Google alumni accounts in January 2016. According to a joint statement from Milan Stanic, the director of IT communications, and Erika Knudson, vice president of Advancement communications, these accounts were allotted 1 TB limits that were not actively enforced. Though several alumni reported being offered “unlimited storage” — including Bhatt, who shared screenshots from his account that revealed “unlimited” data storage in 2016 — Stanic and Knudson said the University had no record of offering unlimited storage. Several alumni, including Bhatt and Victoria Gruenberg ’16, reported seeing 100 TB limits on their accounts in September 2024.

According to Stanic and Knudson, 32,077 alumni (of an estimated 100,022 living alumni) have Princeton Google accounts, and 3,803 alumni accounts exceeded the 22 GB limit as of mid-November. But “the number of alumni exceeding storage limits continues to decline,” they said.

Ordinarily, when a user runs out of cloud storage, he or she can buy more storage at a higher quota. However, Google does not allow educational accounts to be converted into consumer accounts, so alumni cannot simply pay for additional storage. They’ll have to move their data — or lose it. While the personal cost of maintaining digital storage may be relatively modest, several alumni reflected that transferring their data would be daunting, especially given their unique, individual needs.

Some, such as Benjamin Bernard *22, a postdoctoral fellow in history at the University of Virginia, say that the alumni data storage has been critical to preserving his academic research. “In academia, our positions are often short-term and precarious,” Bernard told PAW by email. “We carry our libraries with us from institution to institution, but now those are digital, not just physical … . With the new change in policy, I’ll need to safely migrate around 60 GB of data in the coming six weeks in order not to lose many years of priceless research on which I plan to base my career.”

Gruenberg, a freelance theater director, says the alumni account storage became her “savior” after her computer died in 2020 and she needed to back up her data. “All my archives of shows are loaded onto that drive,” Gruenberg says. “All of these things move, but none of these things move easily. It’s just going to be so crazy.”

If you’re one of the 3,803 who have exceeded the new 22 GB limit, what can you do about it? University Advancement and OIT have suggested that alumni use Google Takeout, a tool for exporting and downloading data from your alumni account, after which you can store the data on a hard drive or on a different cloud service. Alternatively, they suggest you can also delete unnecessary data with several other tools offered by Google.

“For most individuals affected by this change, the Google Takeout export method as described should be sufficient,” Bhatt says. “However, I am sure there is a subset of technically-minded Princeton alumni that have stored terabytes and terabytes of data in their [alumni account], and are now struggling to export their data byte-for-byte while verifying data integrity, file counts, file sizes, time stamps, etc.”

As for other cloud storage possibilities, options remain plentiful. Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud Plus, and Dropbox all offer rival paid plans for high-capacity storage. And right now, Amazon Prime members get unlimited photo storage as a perk of their membership.