I got a notification from my old college that I was hoping I would never get. When my wife and I created our Google accounts through Kent State University, they included an awesome promise, free unlimited storage for life. I couldn’t find the old policy for storage, but here is the policy for email.

Kent state university will maintain a students' email account for the life of the student to facilitate communication as an alumnus, or until such time that a former student requests that the account be closed.

So, of course, we took advantage of it. We’ve been using those alumni accounts for Google Drive and Google Photos for years, since the storage was free.

But recently, Kent decided to change their policy on storage.

Your ability to access FlashLine, Canvas, Kaltura, email, Google Drive and Microsoft services will be deactivated on October 14, 2025.  After this date, you will no longer have access to your email or cloud storage (such as Google Drive or OneDrive). Please review the instructions below to ensure you do not lose anything you wish to retain.

Now we have until October 14 to move all of our files and photos, or lose them all.

I expected this would happen someday, because how in the world could Kent expect to maintain unlimited storage forever for a growing alumni body? But still, it sucks now that it’s happening.

Those accounts have all the photos and videos from when we were first married, our first house, our daughter, everything. Not to mention, I have all sorts of important tax and legal docs stored in Drive.

So my heart sank when I first heard the news from Kent, but now I’m in the middle of the dull monotony of downloading and re-uploading a terabyte of data. I bought a Google One account for storage, because we’ve been happy with Google’s various cloud services. I expected Google would have an easy way to magically move data between Google accounts, but that was not the case for many of their services.

Google has two services called Transfer and Takeout. Transfer is the good one, that automatically moves your data to a new account, and works with Gmail and Drive. But for Photos, where I have most of my data, I have to use Google Takeout. That’s their service for downloading your data to your device.

So the roughly Terabyte of photos and videos that I need to migrate is getting chunked into 50GB zip files that I then need to download, unzip, and re-upload into Photos in my personal account.

It’s taking a long time, and I’m bored.

I’ll be looking into redundant storage options, because I don’t want to go through this all over again if Google discontinues Photos. It wouldn’t be the first thing they’ve discontinued.

Update September 12, 2025 8:56 AM
I found a better way to migrate my Google Photos between accounts. I realized I can use Partner Sharing to automatically “save” the photos to a new account. It makes me a little hesitant, because it says the photos don’t count against my storage quota, so they must still be saved under the original account technically. Apparently, when the photos are deleted on the original account, then they will be saved into the new account that they have been shared with. It smells fishy, but I’m going to try it out. I’m making backups of all photos first before I try it though. I’m really hoping this saves me from all the downloading, unzipping, and uploading 🤞

Thank you to the good people of reddit and UConn for sharing this method. I’m glad I came across this because I was already seeing issues with missing metadata from some of the photos I was exporting from Google Takeout.