Rice Storage Strategy

Announcement to all Rice students, faculty and staff regarding changes to Rice provisioned file storage services.

After Box and Google announced the end of unlimited storage for higher education in late 2019 and early 2021, OIT began developing the Rice Storage Strategy. The changes that will reduce storage and help keep services financially sustainable include:

Google Drive storage quotas established November 2021 for faculty, students, staff and visitors.
- Enforcement of these quotas will begin in December 2022.
Box storage quotas first established in March of 2021 and then updated in May 2022 for faculty, students, staff, research and visitors.
OneDrive storage available for all students, faculty and staff.
- A self-service tool called Mover.io for moving data into OneDrive was made available in July 2022.
Microsoft Teams for students, faculty, and staff available in March 2021.
Alumni Gmail limited to 2 GB per person June 2022
Google Drive and Photos for alumni ended January 2022.
Elimination of Home Drives (U: Drives) beginning December 2021.

The Rice Storage Strategy is managed by OIT in partnership with DAR who are responsible for alumni Google accounts.

The strategy initiative is an effort to:

Change the university's approach to storage services as vendors stop offering unlimited storage.
Minimize disruption to teaching, research, and Rice business storage.
Monitor and react to changes in storage services and pricing.
Prevent excessive storage growth and the unsustainable costs that would result from it.

Timing

December 2019

Box announced the end of free unlimited storage for higher education.

February 2021

Google announced the end of free unlimited storage for Google Workplace (formerly G-Suite).
Rice OIT began development of the Rice Storage Strategy.

March 2021

Communications were sent to individuals who were exceeding the Google storage quota to inform them of planned enforcement and steps to reduce usage.
Box storage quotas set for students at 500 GB, and 1 TB for faculty and staff.
OIT announced availability of Microsoft Teams for students, faculty and staff
- New Teams can be created upon request to the OIT Help Desk.

November 2021

The end of OIT provided personal U Drives is announced to the organization.
OIT announced new storage limits for Google, Microsoft and Box with effective dates.

December 2021

New U: Drives are no longer being created and unused U: Drives are automatically decommissioned.
Customers are asked to begin moving their data from U: Drive into available cloud storage locations in OneDrive, Box, or Google Drive.

January 2022

Services for Google Drive and Google Photos storage were removed for alumni.

May 2022

OneDrive made available to all students, faculty and staff.
Box storage quotas updated to 1 TB for students and 2 TB for faculty and staff.

June 2022

Alumni Gmail accounts limited to a 2GB quota.

July 2022

Mover.io is made available to students, staff and faculty for the self service copying of data to OneDrive from Google Drive.
Reminder communications were sent to anyone exceeding the Google quota.

Fall 2022

Rice OIT will continue to work with customers to move or reduce Google data into OneDrive or Box.
OIT begins curated migrations of user Home Drives (U: Drive) to Rice OneDrive by cohort groups. Users are notified by email prior to any migrations. User access to U: Drive is disabled upon data migration and no longer auto-mounted on login. Users are encouraged to review contents of their Rice OneDrive to ensure all U: Drive items are present.

December 2022

OIT curated migrations of user Home Drives (U: Drive) to Rice OneDrive continue.
Home Drive (U: Drive Personal Storage); December 16th is the final day for all non-migrated users to access their U: Drive. Remaining users, along with CLEAR authorized users, are migrated to Rice OneDrive. CLEAR user file storage is replicated and migrated to new CLEAR managed file server.
Google Drive; December 17th is the final day for all customers to be under their allotted quota.

January 2023

OIT will begin enforcement of the quota on Google Drive. Anyone over the established quota will not be able to save new data to Google Drive.
Home Drive (U: Drive); Any U: Drives with content will be automatically copied to a sub-folder in the customer's OneDrive.

February 2023