OneDrive data now has an expiry date

One drive is an insanely poorly implemented solution to a problem nobody really had.

For enterprise companies, ones I've worked in at least, they will auto sync the users folder /c/Users/(name) with one drive, but there is some weird alternative they have to set on the windows system to actually use a workspace for the user.

So when I'm on site somewhere, and have no access to a network that's safe, I can't access files that are in my documents folder, pictures or desktop.. when I never asked OneDrive to lift and shift my days off my machine.

I've had the guys turn off one drive explicitly on my machine several times but it keeps reactivating itself as soon as I sign back into the AD.

They can't figure it out, I can't trust it, and the company pays for it.

F OneDrive. They locked me out without any explanation and without any notificaiton, ended my subscription and I lost valuable photos forever. Stay away from it if you are looking for storage for any reason.

The whole OneDrive ecosystem is scary as hell.

I don't want to imagine how much mess they have in their backend, given that most Microsoft 365 products rely on SharePoint in one way or another. And then, sometimes you get a "peek" of what's happening behind the scenes (spurious folders, random files appearing, hidden libraries, etc...).

SharePoint/ OneDrive suck, but this policy change seems sane. What's crazy if anything is that they didn't have this policy before.

If you start uploading data to your cloud without my clear consent, I already see a very big problem with your product.

If you even substitute the directories in my computer (a standard that was untouched for the last 20 years) in a way to force my stuff into your cloud, then there’s a much bigger problem.

Managers who approved this should be thrown out of the company because this is clearly how NOT to make a product.

> Let me paint a familiar picture. Someone leaves your organisation, or a licence gets removed as part of a cost-saving exercise.

That's a rather weird way of phrasing it. It almost suggested that you shouldn't audit your license needs.

Other than this was always the case, it's hard to see why data stored in a close account wouldn't get deleted.

lol, my org recently silently implemented automatic archiving for SharePoint files with mtimes older than 5 years. Woke up to 20,000 files in cold storage and the only user facing remedy is to manually restore each file one at a time.

After speaking with IT for several days, they begrudgingly exempted my site after ‘leadership approval’ but were confounded as to “why anyone would need files older than 5 years”

Forget the AI boom, there still orgs struggling with storage, databases, and email.

Apologies for my unknowning, but how did this blog get this information? There's no source or anything linked.

Don’t put your data in onedrive at all. We’ve experienced multiple cases of data loss which were definitely either implementation bugs or files simply being unreadable or lost.

Retention and legal holds: Data can still be deleted even if a retention policy or legal hold is in place, unless licensing or billing is restored first. Do not rely on holds alone to protect unlicensed data.

Surprising it doesn't automatically move into an admin or company lawyer's drive so it can be dealt with rather then a few notifications which will probably be missed and the data permanently deleted.

Hasn't this already been the case?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/unlicensed-oned...

You can find multiple comments on past OneDrive posts from people who are/were at Microsoft with frankly terrifying stories of them losing their own or customer data. They all said the same thing: Do not use or trust OneDrive.

IIRC one of the funnier examples was users, their managers, and so on all the way up the chain (perhaps including HR and Legal) being let go resulting in there being no user to transfer the ownership/access to so it was simply deleted.

In an enterprise environment onedrive is perfectly fine. Yet so many developers think they're to good for it. They save their things outside of onedrive and low and behold they lose data. Its so dumb and im yet to hear a good reason why they couldnt have used onedrive.

That happened to me many yeas ago with Dropbox.

I had all my old android's phone gallery there and many years ago. I tried getting them and they were all removed. All my memories removed.

Here is one approach for the frustrated end user forced to deal with OneDrive: Create a local user account and do all your work in there. Periodically manually upload important folders to your OneDrive workspace. Manually upload relevant files to shared team folders. Keep the Microsoft Edge browser as your SharePoint workspace. Work on shared Office artifacts through the Edge browser. Use Chrome or Firefox for everything else.

Results may vary depending on your organization's configuration and policies. You may get labeled as a rogue employee.

But if you keep code synced with GitHub, keep Confluence docs updated, stay responsive when shared docs need your input, people might never notice.

This sounds very reasonable. If you stop paying then they stop serving you. Am I missing something?

I'm really confused by the article. What the hell does unlicensed mean? Does unlicensed means free (as in free personal onedrive accounts)?

I'm not against getting help from AI when writing, but at least take some time to make sure it's not place-filler slop.

AI;DR: Starting from early July 2026, all associated data will be deleted 12 Months after a user license is removed.

Pretty fair... if you don't pay, the data doesn't stay

OneDrive already deletes files randomly... This only makes it worse.

Joke of a company

"Your OneDrive data..."

No, it's not my OneDrive data. What an infuriatingly click-bait title.

It's OneDrive data for individaul user accounts at organisations that are unlicensed (probably, as the article says, for people that have left).

This will have a huge impact on a lot of organisations, for example those that have a communal SharePoint, or shared document page: files shared from ex-employees for critical documentation is going to break.

This will cause some major headaches.

Don't use Microsoft OneDrive. They mine your data and share it with the US government. And - as the International Criminal Court staff has recently discovered - they will cut you off from your data if they, or the US government, decide they don't like you.

OneDrive itself should have expired years ago.

[dead]

I wonder why FTP is not enough?