Back Up Your Google Data

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Getting ready to move on, but not sure how to take all that Google Drive goodness with you? Maybe you want to move those emails out. We'll cover tips and techniques for getting your work data, email, and stored files into a personal Google account.

Let's Get Started!

Google's New Storage Policy

June 1, 2021: High-quality photos will count towards Drive quota beginning June 1, 2021. There is no change to this timeline.

February 1, 2022: Any newly created Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, or Jamboard files will count toward storage. Existing files within these products will not count toward storage, unless they’re modified on or after February 1, 2022. (source)

Consumer Account?

If you are inactive (two years) or exceed storage limits, you will lose your data. This applies if you store data in Gmail, Drive, or Photos.

To be inactive, this means you’re not logging into these services.

Google Workspace for Education

Google’s new policy, going into effect July 2022, limits Google Workspace for Education users to a total of 100 terabytes of pooled storage. That means, if you have ten thousand students and three thousand staff, they will all share that 100 terabytes. This makes saving unlimited number of videos and content for free in Google Workspace for Education’s Drive storage a thing of the past.

A few specific points from Google’s new policy for storage:

  • Education Fundamentals and Education Standard editions offer pooled storage of 100 terabytes, although institutions with greater than 20,000 students, faculty/staff will be provided additional storage. The process for requesting more storage becomes available at the end of 2021.

  • Your school district or organization can get additional storage through Education Plus and/or the Teaching and Learning Upgrade.

  • With the Education Plus upgrade, you receive an additional 20 GB for each paid license on top of the 100 TB of pooled cloud storage shared by your organization (source).

  • With the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, you get an additional 100 GB for each paid license in addition to the 100 TB of pooled cloud storage shared by your organization (source).

No more free ride!

Next Steps

  1. Divide your Google Drive into two folders:

    • Shared with Others: Keep only what is shared with others.

    • Only for Me: This is what you will be saving to your computer.

  2. Run the Google Drive Cleaner to get rid of duplicate files. This step alone will save you space.

  3. Save the Only for Me folder to your computer.

  4. Put the Only for Me content on a USB external drive.

In the long run, it can be quite expensive to pay for Google storage now that they have changed their policy. USB drives last 3-5 years. Add a little redundancy with an extra drive purchase, using FreeFileSync to backup.

Be sure to read the blog entry.

Explore the tips below to clean out your Gmail, Photos, and Drive. Get rid of anything you don't need, and use alternatives to Google Storage.

Tip #1: Get Rid of Junk Mail

Let's start with Gmail first!

The first thing you need to do is ensure you aren’t grabbing confidential, student data, or sensitive information. These are bits and bytes you do not want subject to open records requests. Make sure to delete those items with personally identifiable information (PII) about staff or students.

Did you subscribe to JC Penny’s or Macy’s sales with your work email account? Get rid of those messages. Maybe your Google Drive is full of content shared with you? Time to clean that up.

Next, you will need to run some searches and remove emails with attachments (use the has:attachments search to find those). Get rid of unwanted calendar invites (search: “Invitation:” or “Updated Invitation” or “Canceled”). Eliminate any shared document invitations, too. Search on “drive-shares-noreply@google.com” to find and then delete them.

Are you a member of any Google Groups? Do you really need all those emails? Throw those out. Remove your labels and message filters. You can do that one by one on the left-hand side of the screen or go into Settings to remove them in bulk.

One last tip for essential emails: Create a folder/label with all the messages you want to keep. Taking these steps ensures you have eliminated all the detritus.

Tip #2: Empty Your Google Drive

This next tip requires you to be ruthless. Over time, your Google Drive has gathered a lot of junk. What you need to do is decide what is worth keeping and what needs to be done away with (think “Does it bring me joy?”.

Now that you are done, you have several options to get backups of your G Suite data, including your email and Google Drive.

One easy way to clean it out before sorting is to use the Google Drive Cleaner. It will go through your Drive and remove any duplicate files you may have.

Read more about this process.

Other Tools You can Use

Google's BackUp & Sync (Google Home/Consumer)

or Google FileStream a.k.a. Drive for Desktop (Google Workspace)

If you work on a Mac or Windows computer, you may want to be able to interact with files and folders on your computer rather than going to the cloud version of Drive. Get the Backup & Sync version of Google Drive. I use it to keep identical copies of my documents on all three computers I work on.

Everything I do is saved to Google Drive on my Windows computer. When I get home, I simply turn on my computer and wait for the files to synchronize. Before going on the road, I am able to turn on my laptop. It will put or get files/folders as needed from Google Drive.

Even better, I can turn on selective sync, a fancy way of saying to Google, “Save this but not that on my computer.” As you can see in the image below, you can copy-and-move files in a normal Windows 10 “File Explorer” space.

Copy Folder

“This [free] app will copy all contents and sub-folders within a Google Drive folder, all while preserving the original folder structure.

As long as you have viewing rights on a folder, you can copy the entire folder to your own Google Drive. The folder will be placed in the top-level of your Google Drive, and you can move it from there.”


Tip #3: Clean out Google Photos and Videos

Get rid of screenshots and meme images. Images like screenshots, memes, etc. take up space. But you don’t need them since you can find them online.

Be sure to use Google Photos’ Archive option to dump these pictures. In that way, you get rid of images that are automatically backed up from your smartphone. These are images that can include memes, cat pics, and more.

Save Videos To Your Device, Remove from Photos

To get more space back, remove videos stored in Google Photos. This is easy since you can type “video” in the Google Photos search bar, and you’ll get a list of videos.

You can select them one at a time or by date and then use the MOVE TO TRASH option.

When I cleaned out my Google Photos, I dropped 400 videos in the trash.

Tip #4: Dump Unsupported Video Formats

Go into the SETTINGS for Google Photos and manage “Unsupported Videos.”

Trash those since Google can’t play them for you and they are just taking up space.

Tip #5: Google Storage Manager

Think you got it all? One final way to double-check is to use Google’s Storage Manager.

You’ll be able to clean out discarded items (such as deleted and spam emails) and Google Drive deleted files. You will also be able to see large items and remove those.

Find Alternatives to Google

Need Google Photos alternative that make it easy to share photos with others? If you're paying for Amazon Prime, that may be enough. Or, if you have an account with another provider shown below, consider using them instead. Which solution has unlimited photo storage for the cost you are looking for?

Need Google Mail alternative for personal. Get a secure email client, such as ProtonMail or Tutanota. Both have free options, and apps that work on all your devices.

Move Your Google Data Out of Drive and Gmail

  1. Google Takeout Transfer

The "New" Google Takeout - Email & Files

If you need a solution for Chromebooks, give Google Takeout Transfer a try. If it’s not been locked up as an option, you can use this easy option. It copies all the email and files you own. When you set this up, you will be able to copy content from your school account to a personal Gmail account.

Before you see the screen below, you will be asked to verify your personal Gmail account. Make sure that you have sufficient space to house all your school content.

Google creates in your email folders/labels a special folder with the date and time. The folder name is “Moved.” Don’t worry, the original copy remains in your school inbox. After the content arrives in your inbox, you will see a new folder or label.

You will see a copy of your email in the box. Once you have the emails in your inbox, you can move them to whatever other folder or label you want them to be in (e.g. “School”). Since you can run this process daily, you can clean out your inbox with the same frequency.

For Google Drive, you will see something similar. Depending on the quantity and type of files, the process can take longer.

2. Google Takeout

The "Old" Google Takeout - Email & Export Files to Download

The old Google Takeout makes it easy to save all your Google content as files you can save on your computer or a USB external flash drive. The main benefit is that it lets you get copies of much more than Drive and Gmail. You can get Google Photos, Google Sites, Blogger posts, etc.

While it works well, you are going to need a program like MS Office 365 to open the files. You may want to rely on a free, open source solution (FOSS) solution like LibreOffice, OpenOffice, or NeoOffice. All of these work on Windows, Mac, or GNU/Linux operating systems, but not Chromebook.

Other Approaches for Moving Files

Use CloudHQ.net. It does a great job of copying/moving content from Google Apps for Education or Gmail to a private/public Gmail account and vice versa. It can also move Dropbox to Google Drive or any supported cloud storage or vice versa. You can sync content back and forth between a variety of services, which makes it a pretty neat deal at $9.90 per month (if you need that level of redundancy).

CloudHQ.net also offers the opportunity to have a 15-day free trial, which works well for staff who are leaving and may just need a one-time task. Another benefit is that you can set ownership for documents that are transitioned to a new location.

Try MultCloud.com. Using MultCloud, you are able to “transfer, migrate, backup, sync, move, integrate, manage many cloud drives such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, MEGA, SugarSync, Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon S3 as well as FTP, WebDav, etc. And, transfer files across different cloud drives, such as transfer data from Dropbox to Google Drive.”

MultCloud has also created a Chrome add-on that you can use to easily move/copy content. After introducing Multcloud to teachers in a school district, they immediately began using it to backup their GoogleApps for Education information from GoogleDrive to their personal Gmail/Drive account!

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Getting ready to move on, but not sure how to take all that Google Drive goodness with you? Maybe you want to move those emails out. We'll cover tips and techniques for getting your work data, email, and stored files into a personal Google account.

Read the companion blog entry