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How to free up space in Google Shared Drives

Shared drives draw on your organisation's pooled storage, the same pool as everyone's Drive, Gmail and Photos. Freeing space means finding the drives that hold the most, emptying their trash, and moving finished work somewhere it can still be found.

How much you have

EditionPooled storage
Business Starter30 GB per user
Business Standard2 TB per user
Business Plus5 TB per user
Enterprise Standard and Plus5 TB per user

Twenty people on Business Standard share 40 TB.

What stops at the limit

Once the organisation is over its storage by 25 per cent, or has been over for 14 days, people can no longer add new files to Drive, create new Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings or Forms, or record Meet calls. Photos stops as soon as you go over. People can still sign in, use email, and view and download files.

Admins can also set a storage limit on a shared drive. A drive over its own limit stops taking new files and edits even if the pool has room. A shared drive holds at most 500,000 items, trash included.

Free space in this order

  1. Find the biggest drives. In the Admin console, go to Storage and View all shared drives, and sort by storage used.
  2. Empty their trash. Files in trash count until they are permanently deleted, and only a drive's managers or an admin can do that.
  3. Look for copies. The same rushes or exports kept in two drives count twice.
  4. Move finished work out. Old jobs and closed projects are most of the space in most drives. Leave a note where they were.
  5. Then decide on more storage. Google sells add-on storage at US$15 a month for 100 GB, US$40 for 1 TB or US$300 for 10 TB on an annual plan; for Business editions an upgrade can be cheaper.

Docs, Sheets and Slides on the way out

Google's own files only open inside Google. Anything that leaves Workspace is exported, usually to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Check that exports open before the originals go, and keep a list of what was converted.

Where Shed fits

Google's add-on storage costs less per terabyte than a shed, and the pricing page says so. The reasons to move finished work out anyway: it leaves the live environment and its sharing, and it is checked file by file, snapshotted and copied a second time. Shed Sweep handles Shared Drives the same way as SharePoint libraries and exports Docs, Sheets and Slides in their Office formats.

Questions

Does trash count toward Google Workspace storage?

Yes. Google counts content in Trash until it is permanently deleted. In a shared drive only managers can delete from trash.

Can we limit how much one shared drive uses?

Yes. Admins can set storage limits for shared drives by organisational unit. A drive over its limit stops taking new files and edits, and the limit applies the next time someone adds or edits a file there.

Is buying more Google storage cheaper than moving files out?

Per terabyte, yes: 10 TB of add-on storage is US$300 a month. Moving finished work out is about what the files need: verification, snapshots, replication across our nodes, and a live environment with only live work in it.

Sources

Related
What Microsoft's extra file storage really costsUS$0.20 per GB a month, counted in binary. How the pooled quota is worked out, what a year of overage costs, and the cheaper routes.How to archive a SharePoint library without breaking linksStrictly, you can't keep every link. You can make sure nobody ends up at a dead end. The steps, in order.What happens when SharePoint storage is fullOne pool for every site and Team. What counts against it, what Microsoft does when you go over, and the three ways out.All guidesEvery question we answer, on one page.
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