If your school’s Google Shared Drive folder runs out of space, here are a couple fixes you can try

A week ago I had students come tell me the server was full.

I had not heard this in a while.

During the pandemic, we moved the staff server online to Google Drive and have kept things there ever since. Students have logged everything from Indesign pages and photos to videos and their organizational documents.

When I heard it was full, I was not shocked because the students were moving a lot more video into the space. I was surprised to hear, later in the day, that we were not the only ones who ran out of space. It seems like settings were changed and numerous staffs were experiencing the same thing.

If you and your staff are in a similar situation where your Shared Drive is full, here are two ways you can work to fix the problem:

  1. Reach out to your school or district’s tech department and see if they will change the cap for you. For many schools, it was that easy. District tech personnel are able to go in and change the limits on Shared Drive accounts so maybe this will work for you.
  2. Another option is to just create another Shared Drive (or two…). My staffs had all of their work in one Shared Drive with numerous folders within. To fix our problem, we moved each staff into it’s own Shared Drive folder. So, yearbook had their own Shared Drive, Photo had their own, Video had their own, etc. That solved our problem and then everyone was just shared on each others drives.

Hopefully, those fixes help you if you run into that problem. Do you have another solution that works? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Written By: Aaron Manfull