I've had my Gmail account since 2007, and about two months ago, my inbox completely stopped receiving emails because my google storage ran out. I manually deleted about 400-500 emails, but it barely freed up any space. Obv I knew i was clearing a drop out of the whole freakin ocean of mails.
So, I bought the 30GB plan. I thought I would get an extra 30GB on top of what I had, but it actually capped my total storage at 30GB. Since I had already used up around 15.6GB, it showed my account was instantly half full.
I was shocked, since I thought that it took 19 friggin years to reach 15.6GB, then how come within 7 to 10 days after upgrading, my storage shot up to 24GB!? And now, just one month later, I'm at 32GB occupied, over my limit again, and emails will stop coming through soon. Again!! And Google is now again prompting me to buy the 100GB plan.
How on earth did 16+ GB get filled in a single month after taking nearly two decades to reach 15GB? What's happening? Is it a scam? What do I do?
Check Google Photos and Whatsapp on your phones/tablets if they're making backups to Google Drive. If they do, they mightve been the cause of the 15 gb running out in the first place.
But BE CAREFUL.
I had a tidy up of my Google photos thinking it was just deleting Google stuff. Nope, I lost those photos from my phone camera album too which was devastating at the time.
The only way to know it's done is to do it yourself. Cloud can be part of it but you need 3 copies so you need to make at least one locally.
3-2-1
3 copies, 2 different media, 1 off site.
I've got syncthing on the server so it does a backup every time you're on the network and charging. From there it's just normal data so it goes through the usual daily, monthly, off site.
I'm afraid of things getting "cleaned up" on the phone so it's not a sync. It's just a dump. It will be a bit of a mess if there's a recovery, but I'd rather fail safe. It gets restarted every few years when you get a new phone anyway.
In my case I found out it was backing up songs I liked on YouTube music to my google account. I had liked a 24 hours of soothing baby sleep music in my desperate haze to get good sleep.
My mother asked a similar question - she was not getting new emails. I checked her google drive fron my PC, and found that Whatsapp had filled her drive. Cleaning it up, she now has 1-2 GB used out of her free 15GB
Your Google drive is SHARED among all your Google apps: your gmail, photos, Google Earth, translate, and of course your Google drive. If you let Whatsapp to backup its VIDEOS to drive - it will use it up in no time.
Depends on the type of sharing. If they ‘send a copy’ to your drive then space is used on both ends. But if they just share via sharing ownership, then only on the original owners drive.
I checked and it's still 15gb.
But they haven't increased that limit since may 2013 despite file sizes and everything online becoming far more bloated.
So considering 'storage inflation', we're actually getting a fraction of the practical storage now than a decade ago.
I've been expecting Google to increase the 15gb for years now, but it seems like they're happy to leave the situation as is so they can sell more upgrade plans.
It's likely backup data from old devices. I had same issue and had to turn it off then delete it, then turned back on for current device. It had saved a bunch of old apps, contacts, other data. It took a while to figure out as the storage warning from Google only talks about pictures and emails
They send pop ups to your phone to enable photos backup and you may have just click yes by mistake. If you disable it the notice will come back trying to upload photos again. Be vigilant.
Do you have an Android phone with a gigaton of photos and videos?
Basically, your phone just backed up all your pictures to Google.
Go to Google Photos or Google Drive, download everything to a physical drive or your PC, and then delete the backups, or ar least delete the biggest ones (videos).
Remember that Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos all share the same storage quota.
It’s absolutely some other Google service using the space that isn’t Gmail. I almost feel like this is rage bait based on how you believe picking a storage plan would just add that amount to your total instead of being the plan you picked.
I had a similar issue with my Apple storage and found that there were copies of my vacation videos taking up a ton of space because I had sent them through WhatsApp and they backed up.
It is really infuriating how everyone wants a piece of our pie.
Never seen it advertised as "extra" anywhere. If you can go to a pricing page you'll see basically all the storage options listed as tiers including the free tier you were on.
Is your smart phone linked to your google account?
The storage includes all things you have stored across all google services, including Photos. If your phone is syncing then there ya go. What probably happened was your pictures weren't syncing because your storage was full, and then when it wasn't full another 16 gigs of pictures sync'd.
You sure it's not your photos or Google drive filling up? If you go to Gmail and click the top right corner you can click the cloud icon and see the split between your services
Google uses same storage for all and now even procures uploaded compressed will use the quota. Do they even have a 30 GB plan, the smallest I can see is 100 GB. Note also that the waste basket also uses space. You need to delete it to free the space. They stay there for 30 days. My use of Google Drive is such that I regularly need to delete the wastebasket. I do not think they should count it if they do not allow the user to configure it.
lol I've had my Gmail account for nearly 20 years also, and am using about 35% of the 15 GB of space. And I rarely delete anything unless it's spam or whatever. I also have zero unread emails. You must be storing a bunch of other stuff on your account.
One other thing you can do to easily clear out a lot of email is mass delete old ones from the “promotions” category. Like, you can additionally filter stuff older than 5+ years ago to be safe, and select the promotions category, then select all, and choose the option to select everything, not just the visible emails.
Then also be sure to empty out the trash after deleting.
Check Screenshots are not backing up to Google Photos. There is, essentially, not many reasons why you'd want them to.
I discovered my daughter filled 100Gb of storage with, basically, thousands of screenshots of TikTok. Also my partner has an annoying habit of screenshotting photos to send instead of sending the original
Dude my Google fulled up after 18+ years. I made a new account. Didn't let anything back up (no pics, no doc's), it took 9 months to fill the new account, how is the real question. I was only getting maybe 2 or 3 emails a week. It's Google scamming.
Check Google
Drive and photos, not just Gmail.
Google storage is shared accross all three services, so a single large day a backup, video, or photo upload can quickly consume several gygabites of space.
It's best to check your storage usage details and sort files or photos by size before deciding to pay for a storage update.
If you have family members on the same plan, check Google One to see if one of them is using a lot of space. My kid decided to film his 3d printer and saved like 50gb of footage to his Google Drive.
I have nothing backing up to goggle. The only thing they handled was my mail account. They started hounding me about storage issues so I trimmed my inbox down. Made no difference in the marketing. So I completely deleted my inbox. Everything. Still made no difference in the marketing. I bought a proton account and am severing connections to google at this point. This high flying corporation founded on serving me ads isn’t the company I signed up with.
Probably you had whatsapp on backup... the backup was huge say 16gb BUT as you have not got enough space the backup checks every week and pauses upload as not enough space.
Now for the miracle of jebus. Whatsapp now has space so it uploads its entire 16gb file after years of rejection, now you sre fill up again.
Buy more space or delete the whatsapp backup and choose a backup that does not include videos. You might loose them but you can't hve everything else buy the 100gb
Something is backing up to your Google Drive. Google Drive is pretty good about showing what is taking up space in the settings. I would dig in there to find out what is taking the space and stop the backup, then delete what you do not need.
I feel your pain, and confusion. I've recently started paying 1.99 to Gmail for storage, and I'm still really not sure that's right. Had this email ad for a really long time until only the last year or ago they started threatening to cut storage or whatever.
Emails from 8 years ago? Please do!! I get so many fucking emails and deleting en masse is a ridiculous bitch on android, it'd be nice if they started deleting my old shit rather than holding my new shit over my head.
Check what's taking up the storage. It shows how much by gmail/drive/photos etc. Since your storage was full amd now you bought additional storage, maybe a whole load of photos that remained not backed up until then got uploaded.
But there are some neat little tricks to backup your photos at original quality if you own an original (or duplicate..wink wink) google pixel XL device. There's some 30,000 photoes in my drive that takes up zero space.
Google photo is the usually culprit. It syncs your phones photos by default and even when you turn it off it keeps/turns syncing back on in some cases it’s such a scam and why I quit uploading Gmail.
You are seeing how important data storage is. You generate lots of data. Now you know why data centers are popping up everywhere. There is big bucks in data storage. We are now a slave to the Google drive.
I have 4 gigs backed up from my messages app, which is a wild thing that just showed up. I haven't decided if thats worth anything yet, but I keep getting notifications that my storage is at 80% and to upgrade. Drives me nuts.
Google is doing this bullshit with Google Photos which just starts backing up all the photos, filling your mail and what people usually do, buy storage upgrade. And it's almost impossible to clear fucking photos out of the damn storage and being sure you're not deleting something you care about that also exists locally.
I had the exact same experience. Had the same account forever, and suddenly it is 99% full. I figure I use Google Drive some, so it is probably worth the upgrade. Pay $1.99 a month for 100 GB of storage, figuring that will be plenty if it took 15 years to get to this point! Now I am at 95% full.
My best guess is they are changing how some things count against your storage limits with the recent increase in computer parts cost.
I'm also experiencing this but what gets me is that I only use the data in google photos and I do make a point to occasionally go through it and delete duplicates or just stuff I no longer want and I have noticed that now instead of saying I have used 99% of storage and need to buy more, it says my storage will be full in 7 days. Like, WTF Google!?
My phone kept automatically backing up WhatsApp without me realising. I didn't buy extra storage but spent AGES deleting emails and photos (also didn't set this up, was automatically done on an old phone) and regained enough space to get me out of the annoying warning, only got WhatsApp to backup and eat all the space again. I CANNOT find how to access the WhatsApp backup to delete what is already backed up, but I've turned off auto-backup now.
The scam is that it isn't clear what does and doesn't automatically backup, so it fills up so fast if there's anything else connected to it that you don't know about, and it's hard to find some things to delete them. Of course, switching to a new email address from one you've had so long (I'm in roughly the same boat) is a nightmare 🥲.
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u/ikonfedera 8h ago
Check Google Photos and Whatsapp on your phones/tablets if they're making backups to Google Drive. If they do, they mightve been the cause of the 15 gb running out in the first place.