Graduating students: suspend, transfer, archive, or delete?

There is no single right answer, but there is a right order. Students can only move their own work while they can still sign in, and two separate settings have to be on before the transfer tool works at all.

Every June the same question arrives, and it is never really one question. What happens to a graduating student's account is at least four decisions — access, their data, your storage, and your records obligations — and they have different right answers and different deadlines.

The one that has a hard deadline is the one usually left until last.

The short answer

Give students a window to take their own work before you touch the accounts. A suspended student cannot sign in to move anything. Suspension itself is reversible while the account exists, so this is recoverable — but recovering it means unsuspending a dispersed cohort and re-running the announcement, which is far more work than sequencing it correctly once.

Then suspend. It stops access immediately, is instantly reversible, and buys you time to make the rest of the decisions calmly.

Then decide about deletion separately, on your district's retention schedule. Deletion frees storage and licenses; it also closes a twenty-day door permanently.

Archiving, where your edition offers it, sits between suspend and delete and is a license question more than a data one.

Let them take their work first

Google provides a documented path for this: Transfer your content, which copies a student's own Drive files and Gmail into another Google Account.

The important word is copies. From Let graduating students transfer data:

No documents, emails, or photos are deleted during the process; copies are created in the new account while the original files remain unchanged.

Nothing leaves your tenant. Your retention position is unaffected. This is genuinely low-risk, and it is the single thing graduating families ask about most.

Two settings have to be on, and one is not obvious

This is where it fails in practice. The transfer permission is on by default:

By default, the Takeout transfer permission is turned on for all organizational units.

But that permission alone does nothing. Google lists two prerequisites:

Google Takeout is turned on for your users
For users to transfer files they own, external sharing must be turned on for Drive

The second one catches districts constantly, because locking down external sharing for students is an entirely reasonable thing to have done — often years earlier, by someone else, for good reasons. The result is a transfer tool that appears to be available and silently cannot move a single Drive file.

If you intend to offer this, test it with one real student account before you announce it, not after.

What moves and what does not

Students can transfer copies of documents and folders they own in My Drive, their Gmail, and their Photos.

They cannot transfer contacts, chats, or tasks through this tool. They cannot transfer files they do not own — which, in a school, is a great deal of what they think of as "their work": anything a teacher created and shared, and anything living in a shared drive. And the destination account needs enough storage to hold what is coming.

Say this plainly in whatever you send home. "You can take a copy of your own files and email" sets expectations correctly. "You can take your work" does not.

Suspend

Suspension stops access immediately and is reversible with one click. For a graduating cohort it is almost always the right first action, because it is safe, fast, and undoes cleanly when a student turns out to be returning, or repeating, or enrolled in a summer program nobody told you about.

What it does not do is help with storage. A suspended student's Drive content still sits in your pool. Google's own guidance on freeing storage is about deleting accounts and shared drives; it does not present suspension as a storage measure at all.

So suspension buys time. It does not buy space.

Archive

This is the option most districts have and few use, largely because the old assumption — that archiving is a paid tier you negotiate with a reseller — is not how Education works.

From Archive users in Education editions:

This license type is free of charge

An archived user:

  • cannot sign in — "on any system, including Google Workspace services, such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Drive"
  • keeps their data under Vault, "retained based on your institution's Vault retention rules", searchable and exportable
  • releases their Education Fundamentals license, freeing it for reassignment within 24 hours
  • can be unarchived, returning "to their previous status" with access to their previous data — provided a Fundamentals or Gmail Only license is available to give back

Institutions get a pool of them: new accounts receive 2,500, and existing institutions receive a number matching their Education Fundamentals license count at transition.

But archiving is a license measure, not a storage one. The data stays, and it stays counted — Google's wording is that "Data for archived users counts toward your organization's pooled storage limit." So archiving hands a Fundamentals license back to your pool while leaving your storage position exactly where it was. If storage is the pressure you are under, archiving will not relieve it, and neither will suspension. Deletion is the only one of the three that returns space.

So the practical question is not cost. It is whether your obligation is to retain and be able to produce the data — which is exactly what archiving is for, and it hands the license back while doing it — or merely to keep the account recoverable for a while, which suspension already does.

Delete

Deletion is the only option that returns both the license and the storage, and Google is direct that this is what it is for. On freeing up an institution's storage:

By removing inactive alumni accounts, you might free up a significant portion of your shared storage pool

It is also the only irreversible one. The window is short and precise:

You can restore a user account (including administrator accounts) up to 20 days after deleting it. After 20 days, the data is gone and you can't restore it.

Two further conditions can block a restore even within those twenty days: you must have an available license of the right edition, and the domain must still be yours.

Twenty days spans no meaningful part of a school year. A student who deleted their own copy in July and asks in September is outside it. So is any records request that takes a fortnight to reach you.

Where your retention policy permits it, consider running deletion a cohort behind — deleting last year's graduates rather than this year's. It costs you a year of storage and removes almost all of the risk of deleting something inside the window where somebody still needs it. Whether it is available to you is a records question rather than a technical one, and for some districts a retention schedule, applicable law, or a records hold will decide otherwise. This is a default worth considering, not a rule that fits every district.

Everything else attached to the account

Devices. A graduating student's Chromebook is a separate decision, and the wrong choice there can cost you the license permanently. If the device is staying in the fleet, do not deprovision it just because its user left.

Groups. Cohort groups accumulate. A group called classof2019 with 300 suspended members is not doing any harm, but it is one of the things that makes your directory harder to reason about every year.

Classroom. Courses a student was enrolled in persist for the teacher. Archiving finished courses at year end is a teacher-facing job, but it is worth prompting for, because it is the difference between a usable Classroom list in September and a scroll.

Third-party apps. Anything the student authorized with the school account should be reviewed on the same schedule as the account itself.

Retention is not a technical decision

How long you keep student accounts and student data is governed by your district's record retention schedule and applicable law. It is not a storage question, and it is not one to settle in the Admin Console because the pool is filling up.

Get the rule in writing from whoever owns records retention, apply it the same way every year, and note which rule you applied. Student records in particular can carry obligations that have nothing to do with what is convenient in July.

Common mistakes

Suspending before the transfer window. The most common sequencing error. It is reversible — unsuspend and the student can sign in again — but by the time anyone notices, the cohort has dispersed and you are chasing people who have left.

Announcing the transfer without testing it. External sharing being off for students makes the tool useless while looking fine.

Promising students "your work". They will move what they own. Much of what they value is owned by a teacher or lives in a shared drive.

Suspending to save storage. It does not save storage.

Deleting on convenience rather than on your written rule. Where policy permits it, running a cohort behind removes most of the risk for the price of some storage — but the rule your district actually adopted is the one to follow.

Letting each year's answer be decided by whoever is on duty. Inconsistency between cohorts is what makes the eventual records request painful.

What to do about it

Set the sequence once and repeat it: publish a transfer window while students still have access, verify the transfer tool actually works before publishing it, suspend at the end of the window, then delete last year's cohort on a written retention rule.

The decision that needs to be made early is the transfer window, because it is the only one with a door that closes. Everything else can be reconsidered in August.

Sources

Doing this for one student is a five-minute job. Doing it for an entire cohort, in the right order, without catching the year below, is why ORINEX Workspace exists. What ORINEX Workspace does.