Google’s most recent storage policy shift — limiting higher education institutions to 100 terabytes of stored data in Google Workspace for Education — has caused plenty of consternation and policy shifting in higher education.
EdTech has covered these changes in depth, and I wrote about how universities could potentially respond to those storage restrictions back in December. One best practice I recommended then and continue to recommend now is for institutions to thoughtfully enact assignment and retention policies for users. In cases where colleges or universities have taken advantage of tools like Gopher for Drive to assess their storage situations, we’ve found institutions that clog up their storage clouds with data from users who either never completed their enrollment or who left school years ago.
Of course, as higher education administrators already know, it’s not a best practice for that data to disappear completely. In some cases, state law requires colleges and universities to hang on to user data for a set number of years, and in other cases — such as protecting against potential litigation or fulfilling Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests — it’s wise to save those user files somewhere for a determined period of time.
And for institutions that use any version of Google Workspace for Education, there is a free tool that does just that without taking up any precious storage space: Google Vault.Google Vault is an e-discovery archival tool for user data collected through Google Workspace for Education. As of this writing, it’s provided free as an additional tool for all Workspace users, regardless of whether they’re using the free version or one of the paid editions of Workspace.Perhaps just as important as pointing out what Vault is, however, is pointing out what Vault is not: a storage solution. As much as universities may want to wave a magic wand and send all their bloated data to Vault, it is not a backup tool, and data in Vault cannot be restored to Google Workspace.
That said, Vault is an essential tool for data retention and user management. IT administrators logging in to Vault will see a visualization of compressed user data, like pictures of emails or PDFs, that can then be exported as ZIP files.Vault’s administrative interface is easy to navigate and allows administrators to set systemwide or more user-specific policies for how long user data should be saved. But those settings must match the broader Google Workspace for Education policies created for users, because once a user is deleted from Google Workspace, that data disappears from Vault as well. Meanwhile, suspended users can have their data wiped from Google Workspace (saving valuable storage space) while remaining in Vault as archived data for a set period. It’s not a best practice for data to be archived indefinitely.
