A free Google account comes with 15 GB. The common mistake is to read that as 15 GB per service. It is one allowance, and the day it runs out your email stops arriving.
One pot, three services
Drive files, Gmail messages and their attachments, and Google Photos backups all draw on the same 15 GB. When it fills, all three stop at once: no sending or receiving mail, and no new photo backups.
Four things quietly eating it
- The trash. Deleted items still count until the bin is emptied. Deleting alone frees nothing.
- Android WhatsApp backups. Google states plainly that these count against the account limit.
- Device backups. Your phone backup sits inside the same allowance.
- Heavy mail attachments. One video attachment can outweigh hundreds of text-only messages.
Two deadlines worth knowing
A WhatsApp backup that has not been updated in five months may be deleted automatically. More seriously, an account that stays over quota for two years risks having its content removed across Gmail, Drive and Photos.
Where to start
The Google account storage page splits the allowance between the three services and lets you sort files largest first. Start with the ten biggest, then empty the bin in Drive, Photos and Gmail, then work through mail with large attachments.
Photograph: rows of servers inside a data centre. Photo by BalticServers.com, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: Google’s official support page on storage limits.
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