Gmail & Drive’s Storage Unite

Early last week, Google announced that they will roll out unified storage across Gmail and Drive, and as an added bonus total storage will be increased to 30GB. This is great news for those Google Apps users who have bumped up against the Gmail storage limit without any way to increase it.

In the past, there have been some solutions to help these folks, like Backupify’s FreeSpace, which enables Admins to proactively manage and address large email accounts.  It’s a way to keep important files while staying within the storage limit.

Now, this increase in storage mitigates some of the problem, but it is still important to manage your inbox. The simple truth for so many of us (myself included) is that we leave a lot of our important files as attachments inside our Gmail.  I personally blame Google’s awesome search, which so many of us are dependent on – we always think it will be easier to search and find something versus use a hierarchical folder system!  But this can leave important files at the risk of being deleted and lost. This is especially true when the only copy of the data resides in the cloud. So, it is always best practice to download your important files and store another copy of them within your Drive or local storage. (Or, of course, you could backup Gmail as well!)