Title says it. Enough warnings, I opened my Google Drive.
I never use it. Not for photos, rarely for docs.
How can it be almost at 15 Gigs when I dont even have a gig in there??
Anything helpful to you here ?
its counting all of your *google storage together (i.e. email, photos, drive, etc.)
in order to keep receiving email at the address tied to that drive account, you are going to have do mass delete or purchase more storage ($1.99/month for a basic googleone subscription which allots 100gb of storage across *google apps - for that specific account anyway)
once you exceed the 15gb your incoming mail wont show up (obv you wont be able to use ANY app past 15gb)… hope this helps
tldr— BASIC answer in 1st sentence
Hi all thanks for the hints ! As I examined all sources, I find that:
A) I do not synch ANYTHING to my Google drive, on purpose. The less Google can see of my life the better.
B) I always backup to HDD in my home. Time Machine and periodic backups. I also have 2 Terabyte drives of all documents, files and photos stored offsite.
C) Removing over 8 Gigs of GMail did the trick.
I don’t cotton to the idea of “the cloud” having every movement I make, every photo I take, every word I write and every bill I pay stored there. Very bad idea…
Anyway, problem solved. I’m at 40% capacity.
You can also manually empty your trash bin (which could be temporarily soaking up a lot of storage).
Alternatively, 100GB is only $20 a year
“I don’t cotton to the idea of “the cloud” having every movement I make, every photo I take, every word I write and every bill I pay stored there. Very bad idea…”
sure, Cartooniverse … until such a time comes when you are thankful for google’s backup. such as an image of your grandfather you accidentally deleted from your computer … or a user-name that was sent to you via email … or keeping in touch with someone … etc.
however, i’d also ascertain, google should be more transparent about it’s methods of backing up your data. just reading ambiguous small text in terms/conditions/privacy won’t help 95% of the people on this planet. an actual email from google would suffice … one that asks you to acknowledge reading their archiving practices and options.
yes, some may refuse google’s discretion … and could, eventually, regret doing so. such is the paranoid era we have cornered ourselves into. however … they all do it … microsoft, apple, google, amazon, facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. … doesn’t matter if they deny or admit … that part is moot. ever read the fine print … when installing an app on your cell-phone … or an add-on/extension to your favorite browser … or software being installed on your computer? doesn’t matter if the product is paid for or not. and we all want the product … so we agree.
remember … you placed a check-mark into the “i read and agree” field.
ref: the above content is only my opinion.
You might also have a lot of Gigs in your Gmail Sent folder; you may want to delete emails you’ve sent with large photos if you don’t need them.
I found out that a couple of cell phone app backup programs were saving huge files into google drive. One was an app backup program and the other was a text/call backup program.
I appreciate the thought and focus of your post and so left it intact as a quote here.
Zero, and I do mean zero of my images are stored anywhere off of my HDD unless I post them to social media. And yes, that means they are scraped by everyone from the N.S.A. to the Kremlin to Google. Fine.
But my real work? Has never been stored on a hard drive connected to the Internet. How do I know? Because I pull the Ethernet before I load images from my DSLR into that HDD. I edit, store, enjoy. Then unmount it from my Mac. And then reconnect the Ethernet.
So, the “cloud” has zero of my media and files.
Zero. 
Yes- I use a Text Message backup that runs them to the Google Drive. There are about a dozen or so of those backup files.
They total less than 1/2 a Gig. Not the source of this issue.
Because that’s a normal thing to do.
Pulling the plug lacks the zippy sexy high-tech élan of anti-virus white-hat deep scanning protective software that must be monitored, updated, patched, paid for, supported and checked.
It also takes less than two seconds and is cost-free. It also cannot be worked around. You do not have to be concerned with inadvertently downloaded scraping software into my hard drive that scrapes all data and images when the external hard drive I value the most is unplugged.
Who gets to say what is normal?
Uh, what? A virus can most certainly stay resident and do harmful things with the network jack unplugged. In can encrypt the drive and hold it for ransom, or scan any files you transfer, uploading them later when the network is available, or whatever. Even for the deeply paranoid, unplugging the network just for file transfers accomplishes nothing.
Air-gapping the computer permanently, and from the very start, is a different story. But that’s not what you’re doing.
Points well taken.