OneDrive data now has an expiry date

emayljames

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.

potatoproduct

This will cause some major headaches.

Sparkenstein

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.

patates

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.

mrweasel

> 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.

reddalo

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...).

bilekas

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.

fithisux

I wonder why FTP is not enough?

ernsheong

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

cube00

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.

quietbritishjim

"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).

monster_truck

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.

einpoklum

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.

rochak

Joke of a company

cde-v

OneDrive itself should have expired years ago.

cryo32

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.

blain

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

Lucasoato

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.

pwarner

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

Fizz43

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.