Starting next month, Northwestern will begin to phase out alumni’s access to their University-issued Google Drive and Google Photos accounts, citing a change in Google’s price model, according to an email some alumni received from the University Thursday.
NU alumni were originally given until Oct. 1 to migrate their files before their documents would be automatically deleted, but the deadline was later extended to 11 p.m. CST on Oct. 13. They will then only have access to their Gmail accounts.
The University has provided alumni free services to their Google accounts with unlimited storage for the last 15 years. During this time, Google ended its free storage program for universities and began charging them when their system-wide account storage exceeded a certain limit.
The change comes as a growing number of universities, including Boston University and Northeastern University, have chosen to suspend alumni’s Google accounts, while others have capped the amount of storage space offered to alumni.
The sudden notice on Thursday sent NU alumni scrambling, many of whom still rely on their Google accounts to store documents from their time in college and heavy-file projects required for their current jobs.
“I know so many of my classmates who were reliant on the Google Drive services to store their hard work from college and onward,” said Colin Boyle (Medill ’20), an adjunct lecturer at Medill and former Daily staffer. “We definitely spent some time commiserating … figuring out what to do with our hundreds of gigabytes of storage that we have been relying on Northwestern to provide.”
Boyle, who now works as a photographer at Block Club Chicago, said he has just under 900 gigabytes of material stored in his Google accounts. It would take at least a couple of days for him to now move his documents to a separate platform, he said.
Other alumni say that they didn’t even receive an email on Thursday.
Layla Brown-Clark (Medill M.S. ’24) said she only found out about the update from an X post made by Boyle. Despite having access to her accounts for one year, she said she used it to store all her school and learning materials.
“My teacher had told us we would not have to worry about it, and we would always have access to it,” Brown-Clark said. “Now, all of a sudden, we don’t.”
What’s more, the loss of alumni’s Google accounts also affects current campus organizations that rely on files still owned and passed down from previous members.
NUSTARS, an undergraduate student organization that teaches its members to design aerospace vehicles, is one of many McCormick engineering clubs that face this problem.
McCormick senior and NUSTARS co-President Andy Wehmeyer said for the last 10 years, the club has depended on Google Drive to store all of its documents passed down from past members.
He and others have begun reaching out to alumni to see if they can change the ownership of those files before the deadline arrives.
“I, personally, being one of the student leads for this organization, did not receive any communication from the department carrying out this change, which makes me worry that other student organizations are either in the dark or just now hearing about it,” Wehmeyer said.
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