I Joined Google One and I Bet You Will, Too

There’s never enough cloud storage

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

I fought and fought. In truth, I deleted and deleted in a futile attempt to maintain enough free Google Cloud Storage space to continue receiving Gmail.

They were a continued source of stress, the messages informing me that I’d eaten up 97% of my Gmail storage space, and I’d been seeing them for at least a year. And it wasn't just my Gmail. I have a G-Drive account and store all of my photos and mobile-captured videos (720p to 1080p) in Google Photos.

That service, where I don’t even store the original resolution of all my images (I do High-Quality, which is a slightly compressed, and more efficient version), is an important resource for me. I use it to effortlessly search across two decades worth of digital photos (and a growing number of scanned images shot before the turn of the century).

Google’s storage limits, especially in email, were something I didn’t have to think about until fairly recently.

Gmail started with a free gigabyte of storage in 2004. Google supported the free service with contextual ads generated by “reading” the contents of your emails (really just an automated system that matched keywords with ad content). At the time, a gig of storage for email seemed like a lot, but it soon wasn’t and Google, to its credit, gradually raised the overall amount of free storage, right up to its current 15 GB limit.

As of this year, however, Google made an important change, applying new photo uploads (all after June 1, 2021) to your 15 GB total. That act seemed to accelerate my storage issues. Soon I was spending part of each week permanently deleting spam, emptying the Trash folder, and searching for all emails over 4MB (please, stop sensing me huge attachments) and deleting that, too.

All this work would result in my gaining back roughly 6%-to-7% of my storage space.

Then, this morning, I was informed that I was completely out of storage:

• Images would no longer back up on my mobile devices
• Mail would stop flowing into my Gmail account

I swore I wouldn't pay for yet another cloud storage account. I already pay Apple for a 2TB account…