The Information Technology Systems department at the University of Connecticut announced on Thursday, April 17, that they will begin limiting the amount of cloud storage space students have access to. The change comes as a result of decisions made by Microsoft, the company behind the OneDrive platform, ITS said.
“Starting on May 1st, you will have a 50 GB storage limit in Microsoft OneDrive,” ITS director of enterprise systems Josh Boggis stated in an email to undergraduate students. “When you have used 90% or more of your storage limit (45 GB), you will start receiving notifications from Microsoft. Once you are over the quota, you will be unable to save changes to your files.”
Until now, students and staff had access to 1 terabyte, or about 1,000 gigabytes, on OneDrive. An update to the ITS Knowledge Base now says that undergraduate students will now only have 50 GB, graduate students will have 100 GB and staff will have 200 GB available to them.
ITS says that Microsoft will be reducing the amount of “pooled storage” allocated to organizations who use their Microsoft 365 for Education product suite, equating to the total amount of data stored and used by all UConn users in Microsoft platforms. The change is set to take effect in April 2026.
“If we exceed the limit of our pooled storage, Microsoft 365 services stop, and all files for everyone become read-only,” the ITS article states.
Microsoft 365 is not just OneDrive — it also includes Outlook email, Office applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Access, Teams, OneNote and other products that UConn uses internally like SharePoint and Exchange Email Server.
ITS is recommending that users delete “redundant files” like outdated instructional material and backups of old work to cut down on the storage space being used. However, at an institution like UConn, certain documents and files must be retained and made available for extended periods of time due to university policy and other laws. It is currently unclear how ITS will facilitate the maintenance of these datasets, but they say that UConn is revising and “communicating broadly” about retention standards.
“There may be value in retaining old files, but it’s appropriate to draw a line and decide that some data is just unnecessary,” ITS says in a Knowledge Base article encouraging students to reduce their cloud usage, linked in their recent email.
The ITS email also notes that students who are graduating this semester do not need to worry about the storage quota reduction, because access to Microsoft 365 data is revoked for graduated students approximately 60 days after they leave UConn.
The cloud space reduction follows UConn’s decision to consolidate its productivity software relationships, moving student data from Google to Microsoft in 2024. Previously, staff and faculty used full-featured Microsoft software whilst students used the lite “G Suite”, including Gmail and Google Drive. The transition allowed UConn to save money by only licensing software from one vendor and accurately represent infrastructure used in most careers and industries.
For students looking for alternative storage options, a variety of storage disks are available for sale through the UConn Bookstore and other retailers. Manufacturers like Seagate, Western Digital and LaCie offer different external hard disk models at various price points and storage capacities, according to Wired Magazine.
For more information about UConn’s cloud storage changes or for assistance with data optimization, visit the ITS Technology Support Center at techsupport.uconn.edu.