Google Launches Drive For Education With Unlimited Storage

Students whose school use Google Apps for Education will soon be able to store as many files in their Google Drive folders as they like.

Earlier this year, Google launched Drive for Work, its premium $10/month version of Google Drive with unlimited storage and a couple of additional enterprise features. Today, the company announced that is bringing unlimited storage to Google Apps for Education soon, too, with the launch of Drive for Education.

Individual files can measure up to 5TB, which should be more than enough for most legitimate use cases.

Just like the rest of the Google Apps for Education suite, Drive for Education is available free of charge for all non-profit educational institutions (and there are no ads either). As a Google spokesperson told me, Drive for Education will automatically become available to all Google Apps for Education users over the coming weeks. This is a slow rollout, however, and it will be a few weeks before it reaches all users.

Before the end of the year, Google will also bring free access to Google Apps Vault, its compliance solution for businesses that need to be able to archive emails and chats, for example, to educational users. Enhanced Auditing support, too, is on the road map for educational institutions, but the company didn’t say when exactly that will become available.

Until now, Google Apps for Education users “only” got 30GB of free space for their accounts. That, too, was probably enough for most students, but the price of storage is quickly trending to zero anyway, so Google likely believes that the potential cost of offering unlimited storage — students will likely find some creative uses for all of this storage space, after all — outweighs the benefits of getting these students hooked into the Google ecosystem and cloud storage services early on. Today’s Google Drive for Education users, after all, will likely want to use Drive for Work once they graduate and that starts at $10/month.