Many changes have come from Google recently with regards to storage quotas, GSuite becoming Google Workspace. The most recent is alerting us what will happen to old storage accounts that haven’t been active AND are over their newer quota limits. This includes Google Drive and Google Photos.
As our online accounts grow and evolve, we add and discard accounts. I realize on Google alone I have over 45 different accounts I manage for all of my own entities and that of my clients. That’s a fun LastPass challenge. I also know that there are several clients from my past who have retired, changed companies, or even died that have left their online accounts in limbo. Some may be over quota. Some may contain precious and irreplaceable information. By June 2021, those accounts may disappear.
This is about business, yes, and it’s a remidner about our own personal archives and back ups. Can you name and access all of the accounts where you have family photos stored? Client files? ALL of them? Our digital lives are convenient, but can also be fragmented with starts and stops with the current “best app for…” as well as projects we started on a whim, or that never fully launched.
In our home and my office, December is a time to purge. I’m adding to that list that it will also be a time to review online storage accounts and thin them out.
Here’s a Google reminder, just because you can access items with your current account, it doesn’t mean you OWN the information, files and data. See who the OWNER is. If you need to transfer it to you, request the transfer. If you no longer need it as it is part of your work past, remove yourself from the folders and files. Decluttering is rather freeing.
