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Say goodbye to USB’s

By Ammi Parmar

Ryerson students and staff can now work without storage limits on Google Apps.

Google Apps at Ryerson no longer has a storage restriction to the total amount of file and email space Ryerson students can use. What used to be a 30GB storage limit on Google Drive files has now increased to 5,000GB. However, access to Ryerson Google Apps is revoked five years after a student’s last course registration.

“Ryerson was actually talking to Google about how we could get more storage. Google was getting multiple requests from people to increase the storage space so they decided they would get rid of the quota [of 30GB] all together. Now Ryerson has unlimited Google Drive space,” said Brian Lesser, director of Ryerson’s Computing and Communications Services.

With the expanding need for storage space from both Ryerson students and staff, Ryerson and Google Apps worked on an agreement that the unlimited quota would stay within Ryerson. Students and staff can now store all their files on Google Drive instead of trying to back up their files on multiple different storage platforms. 

“Part of the problem with all the online storage is what if you need to exceed the storage quota? Students sometimes end up using multiple places to store their files. They have certain amount in Dropbox, a certain amount in Google Drive, maybe they have some other service they are using. So the nice thing about having unlimited storage is that it allows you to store all your stuff in one place and keep it organized,” said Lesser.

Ryerson Google Apps allows everyone with an active account at Ryerson to have access to these Google Apps including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. This gives students and staff a platform to keep emails, have the ability to work on online documents with more than one individual and allows access to files through internet connection where ever located.

“I’m glad Ryerson is able to recognize that students and staff have an abundance of important documents to retain and they’re taking action to make things easier,” said Priya Permaul a first year social work student. “Personally, I keep most of my documents stored on folders and it gets very frustrating to have to manually filter out the least important files in order to make room.”

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