Google EDU

Schools and universities rarely have anyone whose job is cleaning up old Drive files. A student graduates, a class ends, and their files sit at the same cost tier indefinitely. Multiply that across a district or university system, and you get years of dead files quietly running up a storage bill nobody's tracking.

Google EDU builds software for K-12 and higher ed institutions, and a lot of those customers had exactly that problem. There wasn't a good way to move that data into a cheaper tier without either breaking access to it or reviewing it file by file, which at that scale isn't really an option, and risks breaking something a teacher or student still needs.

So we built an application that does the migration itself. It finds the eligible files across Drive and shifts them into Google Cloud Storage's cold tier without anyone on the customer side touching a single file.

The application moved roughly one petabyte of data, cutting affected customers' storage costs by seven figures. For education customers on tight, often public, budgets, that's real money freed up for devices, licenses, and staff instead of storage nobody's opened in years. And since the migration runs as a standing process, the savings keep compounding as new files age into eligibility.