Google Drive limits outgoing seniors.
As seniors look toward graduation in May, some are already preparing for the inevitable: losing their school email accounts and the contents in the Google Drive attached to it.
While Morgan Hayes ’18 set up a personal Gmail account for herself in high school, once she came to St. Joe’s, she started using her St. Joe’s email and Google Drive account for “pretty much everything,” she said. Because she wants to keep the poems and creative writing she has stored in her St. Joe’s Google Drive, she has already begun taking steps to save that work.
“I created a new email address and sent my important files to the new account,” Hayes said.
The Office of Information Technology (IT) procedurally sends several emails to students post-graduation notifying them of the date their account will become deactivated, according to Olivia MacKenzie, associate director of IT service management. These emails also include links to resources that explain frequently asked questions, including how to backup data on the Google Drive.
Jillian O’Neill ’18 is not waiting for those emails. She also has begun taking steps to save much of the work she has stored on her school drive, specifically papers, research and articles she can only access through the library.
“If I do something in a Google Doc, I’ll copy and paste it into a Word document to make sure I have it,” O’Neill said. “So, I have everything on multiple different platforms just to make sure I have it backed up and saved.”
However, Hayes and O’Neill may be more prepared than many of their peers.
“We have a lot of people come in, and they have never backed up anything,” MacKenzie said. “So, they only have their stuff stored on their computer and if, god forbid, something happens to your computer, all of that is lost.”
David Parry, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of communications studies, said students should consider having two Gmail accounts, one for school and one for personal content.
“I think it’s smart for students to have one Gmail account they use for all their work and share and participate in the Google ecosystem so that they can collaborate with their peers, send their instructors things,” Parry said. “But then have a separate account where they keep all their things not school related.”
Students who have reached their senior year not having prepared for this issue can start sharing contents of their Google Drive folders with themselves, MacKenzie recommended.
“It works pretty much the same way that you would share out stuff to one of your friends through Google Drive,” MacKenzie said. “You can just share the entire contents of your folder. But then you are also transferring ownership, so you make that other account the owner.”
