New LionMail Quota Limits

Not every file as you see in "My Drive" is part of your storage. Only files that you are the owner of are part of your storage. Files that are shared with you are not part of your storage but part of the storage for the owner (the person who shared it with you).

• Learn how Google handles storage

After your effective date, if you are over quota:

• You cannot upload new files or images to Google Drive.
• You cannot create files in collaborative content creation applications like Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, or Forms. Until you reduce your storage usage, you cannot edit or copy affected files or submit forms.
• You cannot back up any photos or videos to Google Photos.
• You cannot record new meetings in Google Meet.
• You cannot create assignments with new files, export grades to Google Sheets, or make copies of Assignments in Google Classroom.

The following services will still be available to you even if you have exceeded your storage quota:

• You can still sign in.
• You can still send and receive emails.
• You can still view and download files stored in Google Drive.
• You can still view and download photos stored in Google Photos.

After 60 days past your effective date, if you are still over quota:

• Everything above still applies
• Your LionMail account will be suspended.
• If you are not actively working with CUIT to reduce your quota, your LionMail account will be considered dormant and be slated for deletion, even if you are still sending and receiving email.
• CUIT will attempt to contact you to assist prior to your data (Drive & Photos) being permanently deleted.

• For students and alums, there is no ability to increase your quota.
• For Employees, ServiceNow Service Catalog items will be added early in 2025 to purchase additional storage if needed prior to the quota implementation in FY26 (July 1st, 2025).

Pricing for the Storage Tiers is listed below. A Chart String is required to purchase additional storage for one's quota.

Before deleting emails, files, and photos, you can download copies of emails, files, and photos. Once copies are stored on your local computer, external storage media, or another cloud storage account, you can delete the emails, files, or photos from your LionMail account to free up storage space. Google Takeout offers an easy way to obtain a copy of Gmail, Drive, and Photo data.

Email

• Google Takeout

Drive

• Google Takeout
• Download files from the web (https://drive.google.com/) to your local computer, external storage media, or another cloud storage account.
• Use Google Drive for Desktop to copy/paste or drag/drop files to your local computer, external storage media, or another cloud storage account.

Photos

• Google Takeout
• Download files from the web (https://photos.google.com/) to your local computer, external storage media, or another cloud storage account
• Set up partner sharing to transfer Google Photos to a personal Google account. After setting up partner sharing, follow Google's instructions in the "Save your partner's photos" section to create a copy of photos in your account. Then, delete the photos from your columbia.edu account. Remember, you need to empty your Google Photos' trash in order to reclaim storage space used by deleted photos.

Google Takeout

Please see our documentation on how best to use Google Takeout. Please note, CUIT has no ability to diagnose or assist with problems you might encounter. CUIT does not have visibility into the Transfer and Takeout tools, and cannot assist or diagnose issues you may encounter. For support, please refer to Google’s detailed instructions linked below.

Google Transfer

You can use Google Transfer to copy all of your LionMail mail and / or Google Drive content to another Google account. See Google's documentation on using Transfer before you get started.

Please note, CUIT has no ability to diagnose or assist with problems you might encounter. CUIT does not have visibility into the Transfer and Takeout tools, and cannot assist or diagnose issues you may encounter. For support, please refer to Google’s detailed instructions linked below.

Things to Consider:

• You can only copy all of your email or Drive content, not a sub-selection (unlike Takeout).
• You must ensure you have enough storage in the destination account or the transfer will fail.
• The copy process can take up to a week, If you have a lot of content and/or a slow internet connection.
• You cannot halt a transfer once it starts and have no way to monitor it's progress.
• Copied files or email might appear in batches on your Google account during the copy process.
• Google Transfer only supports email and Drive transfers.

Step 1: Create an account

• If you haven't already, create a personal Google Account(link is external)

Alert: Transfers will fail if your personal account does not have enough storage.  You should purchase a Google One storage plan large enough to support your data transfer to ensure success.

Step 2: Prepare your files

Info: You can only transfer files that you own within your My Drive.

• To transfer content that you do NOT own, you must first make a copy. Be sure you have a right to this content outside of your Columbia role.

Step 3: Start the copy process

Tip: Login to your LionMail account in a separate Google Chrome profile from your personal Google account to avoid conflicts and error messages during your transfer.

1. Login to your LionMail account and go to Transfer your content.
2. Enter the email address of the destination Google Account where you want your content to go.
3. Select Get code.
4. In a separate Google Chrome profile, login to your non-Columbia Google Account, check your Gmail inbox for a confirmation email from Google. In the email, select Get confirmation code. A new tab will open with a code.
5. On your Columbia Google account, go back to the Transfer your content page. Enter the code, then choose Verify.
6. Choose the content you'd like to copy (Email and/or Drive content), then select Start transfer.

Step 4: Check your copied files

• When your files or emails are finished copying, you'll receive a confirmation email.
• Check your files before deleting them from your Columbia account. Occasionally this process is imperfect.

We recommend VaultMe as an alternative to Google Takeout and Google Transfer. 

VaultMe is a recommended, optional third-party tool that can be used to copy your Columbia Google account content (email, contacts, calendar, and files) to an account of your choice (alumni account, personal account etc.).  VaultMe does NOT transfer files in Google Photos, so any photos uploaded there will have to be downloaded manually, or using Google Takeout, and then uploaded to your personal Google drive for preservation. 

Features:

• Real-time migration status. 
• Ability to migrate all the files “Shared with Me” that others own (like group projects you may have contributed to but do not own). 
• Detailed migration report showing every item migrated and exactly where it’s located. 
• Advanced technology to migrate at the fastest rate allowable by Google.
• Ability to handle large amounts of data.
• Faster than Google Takeout or Transfer, with almost no failures.

Anyone with an active LionMail account can use VaultMe. Unfortunately, VaultMe is NOT FREE, but it is affordable and Columbia University affiliates receive a 10% discount. 

Cost 

• Charges are based on the number of items and total GBs. 
• VaultMe will provide the user with an estimate before they agree to the migration.

Cost Examples

• 10,000 items and 10GB – Charge would be $14.39.
• 40,000 items and 35GB – Charge would be $25.39.  
• 250,000 items and 400GB – Charge would be $140.39.

VaultMe Migration Steps

1. Navigate to VaultMe.
2. Describe Your Goal: What two types of accounts do you want to migrate between?
3. Copy or Migrate From:  Provide your LionMail email address ([email protected]) and password.
4. Copy or Migrate To: Provide your target account email address and password.  
5. VaultMe will evaluate your target location and provide a Migration Detail screen which summarizes the estimated time, items, GB and total price. 
6. Click the Question mark button next to VaultMe. 
7. Resolve any issues: If you do not have enough space in the target location, VaultMe will guide you through a process to create/ buy space.
8. Proceed to Checkout: You will be asked to provide a payment method for the amount.

If you have any questions about your migration, you can contact VaultMe’s friendly and responsive customer support team at [email protected].

Video Tutorial

Vaultme Video Tutorial

If you want to delete your LionMail account, please submit a ticket to the CUIT Service Desk.

When you first delete an email, file, or photo, it will be moved to the "Trash." Emails, files, and photos in the trash continue to count against your storage quota until permanently deleted. The Gmail, Drive, and Photos applications each have individual trash. While in your trash, items can be recovered within 30 days. Items in the trash are automatically and permanently deleted after 30 days. You can also choose to manually and permanently delete items in your trash at any time by navigating to the "Trash" folder and clicking either "Empty Trash" to remove all items or by selecting individual items and selecting "Delete Forever."

Email, files, and photos permanently deleted from trash are irrecoverable. This applies whether they were manually deleted from the trash or automatically deleted after the 30-day window. If you manually delete emails, files, or photos from the trash, please ensure you no longer need them.

If you delete, restore, or permanently delete many files or folders simultaneously, it may take several minutes for the changes to be processed.

An orphaned file is a file that lost its parent folder. This typically occurs when you share files/folders with others. Someone has a folder shared with you and/or other accounts, and you place a file into it. Then, someone deleted that shared folder, which puts the file/s in the orphaned status. You can check if you have orphaned files by following these steps:

1. Go to Google Drive in your browser or open the Drive mobile app
2. Plug the following string into the search bar: is:unorganized owner:me
3. Run the search, and any orphaned files should show up.
4. Right-click an orphaned file and select "Add to my drive" to restore them to your drive or "Remove" to send them to your trash.
5. If you are deleting them to free up storage space, go to your trash folder, click the files, and select "Delete Forever" to completely remove them from your Drive and Google Storage.

There is no storage quota for Google Groups and messages within its user interface. They do not count towards the University’s total pooled storage limit.

Your quota will change to 5GB approximately 30 days after graduation. Your data will not be deleted immediately, but we strongly encourage you to save any data you want to keep before graduation, as once your storage quota is reduced, if you are over quota, your access to Google Drive and Google Photos will be restricted.

Problem

When trying to use Google's Transfer Your Content feature, you receive the following message:

"Transfer Your Content is only available to authorized Google Workspace for Education Accounts.
Please contact your administrator, or sign in with another Google Account."

Solution

This error is caused when you are logged into more than one Google account. Log out of all Google accounts, then log into your LionMail account as the first or only Google account. You should then be able to use this feature.

Unfortunately, CUIT does not have the ability to group people in LionMail by department for reporting purposes. It is the responsibility of each individual to check their storage use and clean up if over quota. CUIT will be reaching out to anyone over quota ahead of the deadline to remind them to clean up their storage.

To find emails larger than 5 MB, you can search using the following criteria:

size:5m or larger:5m

To find emails sent over a year ago, you can search using the following criteria:

older_than:1y

When trying to change the owner of your files to your personal Gmail, you receive the following error:

"Ownership can only be transferred to another user in the same organization as the current owner."

Google Workspace for Education only allows files inside it to be owned by organization members. That means only LionMail users can own files inside LionMail. This setting cannot be changed and is set by Google. We do allow file sharing to external Google accounts. You can download a copy from that account. The best way to transfer your data is to use Google Takeout or Google Transfer.

It can take up to 48 hours for recently deleted or added files to show up in the storage usage on the back end. Firstly, check that you are indeed looking at your LionMail storage and not your personal Gmail storage. Secondly, wait 48 hours and see if the storage numbers match. Thirdly, when receiving an email from CUIT regarding being over quota, please remember that the data for those email's maybe be a few days old, so if you recently deleted data, we may not have had that recent update before planning your email.

CUIT has no ability to diagnose or assist with problems you might encounter. CUIT does not have visibility into the Transfer and Takeout tools, and cannot assist or diagnose issues you may encounter. For support, please refer to Google’s detailed instructions linked below. 

Google Takeout

Google Transfer

Google has recommended if you run into trouble, to create smaller groupings of files in your MyDrive and then to use Google Takeout to export your files in smaller groups.

Yes. Google Takeout & Google Transfer copies your data, it does not delete it. Once the transfer or download is complete, you still need to manually delete your unwanted data from your LionMail account.

It is possible that the storage is being used by files you own but have become orphaned.

An orphaned file is a file that lost its parent folder.  This can happen in a shared folder/file scenario. If someone shared a folder with you and/or other accounts, you might have placed some files into it. If the owner deleted that shared folder, it puts the files in an "orphaned" status.  These files can be restored if you own them. In the filter field, type is:unorganized to find them. Then drag/move the files into another folder or My Drive. After you move them to a new folder in your My Drive, you can then delete them.

*Note that this does not apply if you own a folder and files within.  If you delete the folder, then the file goes with it.

You will see this message when the owner or the files is over their storage quota. You can reach out to the owner to see if they want to transfer ownership of the file to someone under quota or you can make a copy of the file to regain edit access.

Once the quota is in place, you cannot go over quota using Drive or Photos. It is possible your email can put you over quota. Email functionality will not be affected but Drive and Photos will be limited. You will be alerted if you are near or over anytime you are look in Google Drive or Photos.

There is no administrative way to delete Photos data outside of deleting the LionMail account. There are actually no administrative controls for Google Photos, meaning CUIT cannot restore any deleted data from Google Photos. That being said, open source developers have developed a solution that can help as needed.

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU HAVE SAVED YOUR PHOTOS PRIOR TO DELETING THEM.

3 Methods to mass delete your Google Photos:

Method 1:
- log into Google Photos (photos.google.com) with your [email protected] account
- manually delete photos in bulk, per page
- instructions can be found here.

Method 2:
- log into Google Photos (photos.google.com) with your [email protected] account
- delete photos in bulk using javascript
- instructions can be found here.

Method 3:
Google Chrome Labs github page was recently updated with a new Chrome extension called photospurge that could help you trash your own photos data in bulk after backing photos up through other options such as Takeout or Photos Sharing. 

The extension is run by you within the photos.google.com web application to automate bulk removal of photos. After the script moves photos to the trash, you can choose to empty your trash or wait the requisite time (60 days) for the trash to empty automatically. We recommend deleting your trash as soon as you are sure you have saved everything you need.

For a video of how this script works see here.