RMU uses something called Google Apps for Education. It allows schools to provide all of their students with an email account, a calendar and all those other apps available in the top right corner of Google.com, including Google Drive.

Microsoft was the first to roll out large increases in cloud storage capacity. If you signed up for Office 365 when you installed Office products on your computer, perhaps for an INFS course, then you may have access to Microsoft’s version of Google Drive, called OneDrive. My OneDrive account currently says I have access to 10TB of storage, which is a ridiculous amount of storage already.

Last week while using my RMU Google Drive, I noticed that the usual percentage in the bottom right corner of the user interface had disappeared. After some exploring, I noticed that Google had the audacity to use the word “unlimited” when describing my current space limitations.

Truthfully this is impossible. There must be some limit to Google’s Drive storage capacity. But with storage becoming cheaper and cheaper by the day, less than three years after the launch of Drive with 5GB of free storage, Google seems to have expanded their storage limit to infinity.

 A study published in 2011 in Science Express calculated the world’s total storage capacity to be at least 295 exabytes. Assuming that a computer at Best Buy comes with a 1 Terabyte hard drive, that’s equivalent to almost 310 million new computers. That study was done over three years ago, so who knows where we are now.

They have set some limits on things like file size, and there is some fine print when your organization is four people or less, but for the more than 20 million Apps for Education users, a 1 TB file, in addition to taking weeks to upload, is way bigger than anyone will likely ever come across.

Google Apps for Work, the paid version of the Google Apps for Education designed for enterprise use, recieved the unlimited storage benefits a few months ago. It didn’t take long for Google to compete with Microsoft, and the battle for cloud storage continues as services like DropBox and Amazon try to keep up.

Unfortunately free Google accounts have yet to reap the benefits of unlimited storage. If you are not using your RMU Google account, I would highly recommend logging in and taking advantage. Once you graduate, you have a few semesters to roll your data over to an alumni account which may allow you to keep these benefits for a while longer.