Important Changes coming to OneDrive | Don't lose your files

0:00 Microsoft is making some changes to how one drive retention works that could actually significantly impact your organization and actually cause you to pay more fees and storage costs so in today's video I'm going to be unpacking those changes so you understand the impact and I'm going to be providing you my top recommended actions that you can [Music] take before we dive in just a quick introduction my name is Nick I'm a Microsoft MVP and every week I come out with content around Microsoft 365 and the MSP space okay so diving in here this is the article we're going to be going through and unpacking classic Microsoft article that has a lot of textual information that is quite confusing you know as you read through this there's a lot of asteris if you

0:46 will for the announcement but this paragraph here is really the core focus of what we're going to be unpacking and I built a visual to really make sure you understand what's going to happen in this January 27 2025 time frame basically here it's saying any one drive user account that has been unlicensed for more than 93 days will undergo the following actions and this first bucket here is basically saying if they have a retention policy it'll automatically archive the data after a license removal and it will be visible to admins but not accessible unless you take certain actions which they outline here in this article the other one here is the unlicensed accounts where you just strip a license from a user and and you're not deleting them out of the user list or in

1:33 entra and if they're not covered by any retention policy they're going to be moved into the recycle bin after 93 days whereas today they don't do anything and then subsequently they're going to be deleted permanently so let's go ahead and shift into the visual that I made so you can understand these changes a little bit better okay this is just a quick diagram that I built here to describe the current functionality and then that functionality coming January 27th 2025 effectively here there's kind of two ways you can unlicense quote unquote a user within your ecosystem one of which is to delete the user alog together as then blow them away or go through the user deletion wizard which I will show you here in just a minute when you do that today there's a default 30-day retention where the users can still access that and you can do that

2:20 through a guy and it doesn't require any po shelling things like that but after that it goes into this recycle bin within SharePoint that only admins can access for for that 93-day period if and they can use Powershell really to collect that information then it's blown away forever the other situation here is that you do have some type of customer retention policy which you can set up in the SharePoint admin Center or within a retention policy within the compliance admin Center and I'll show you both of those as well here too and that allows you to retain it Beyond you know the default retention policy that you see here the other big loophole here that we saw that that Microsoft's really trying to solve for is just users being stripped of their license after they leave the organization so think of a

3:06 typical user offboarding event you unlicense a user instead of blowing them away or in often cases you're converting them to a sheared mailbox but you're not necessarily using this user deletion wizard within the admin Center and in those cases data is really retained indefinitely so the big considerations with both of these here is that effectively as an example you could have a 100 user organization that actually has a high amount of churn where they have 100 active users but they have 500 users that are dormant that are disabled that have left and come to the company over time and subsequently all of their one drive data is being retained cuz all you guys are doing as part of an offboarding process that's just unlicensed them and all that one drive

3:53 data could accumulate to terabytes of storage that technically you're not actually paying for today which is why Microsoft wants to move into this new motion so before we hop into that new motion let's take a look at the user deletion Wizard and some of those retention policies so you understand what I'm talking about with that clearly within the Microsoft 365 admin Center you can go under users and active users here and it's part of an offboarding process in some cases you might just click on a user and you block their sign in here and then you go to licenses and apps and then you strip them of their license here which does include the One Drive account that was provisioned as part of that holistic license and that's where it flows into that unlicensed One Drive account versus going into kind of

4:38 this retention deletion workflow that she would have and today again that's where data is retained indefinitely so if you go through the deletion workflow for the user you have the ability here in this case I'm just using a demo count that doesn't have a one drive provision but typically you know you would have this and you be able to provide access to another user and buy default if you have the hierarchy set up for having managers in your active directory it's automatically assigned to the manager for Access and they'll get an email about how to access those and they have 30 days basically to get any files out you know from that account and store them that are important they may store them in their own one drive they may store them in a SharePoint site things like that it's

5:24 always been a constraint I think to think about the retention here for this but those are the couple the ways that you would go through that flow and then on the retention side if we talk about policies for that we can go into the compliance Center but we could also start here in the SharePoint admin Center and within the SharePoint admin Center there's a section here for overall retention here if you go under the settings section here and click on the retention here for one drive it's defaulted here again to 30 days but you can put it up to the 3650 which is 10 years for this and that's what a lot of us have done in the past the other way that you can do this is via the compliance admin Center and

6:09 setting up a retention policy here within the new compliance portal you can go under solutions and then data life cycle management and then you have retention labels but more specifically retention policies is what you can set up here and you could say you have a one drive uh policy and within here you know you can really dictate static I want to say I'm not going to go through this in depth just for the sake of this video for time but you would Target one drive accounts but the main thing I want to show you guys here is that you can spe specify a Time range and some of us may have done this and you could say custom and you could go you know for a

6:55 very long period of time here and uh set that you know for particular um age and then you could say when the items were last modified and you could say delete items automatically or just do nothing you could also just say retain items forever right so that's another setting that you could have set up but now that has some Hefty considerations when we think about the upcoming storage cost so let's shift back to the diagram now to take a look at what's coming in the New Year okay so back here you know as far as these two flows go the user deletion wizard now when we go through this if you've gone ahead and deleted the user but don't have a retention policy same thing kind of articulated here still exist it will go into this default 30-day retention go into this cycle bin

7:42 and then it'll be automatically deleted after that and then in the retention policy scenario it's actually going to be automatically archived after 93 days and it is going to be inaccessible to admins and so you can't even you know restore with an admin Powershell or anything like that you actually have to go through this reactivation process and set up a syntax account with Microsoft which is part of their new backup And archiving solution product and it's really based off of consumption so in this case you're paying for a 60 Cent per gigabyte reactivation fee to access whatever one drive that you're looking to access but the other kicker here is that you're also paying then a monthly storage cost of 5 cents a gigabyte for

8:28 the entire pool now it's a important ASC to call out there when I talk about entire pool let's say you have 100 archived one drive accounts and you just want to access one of them after users just left and we find out oh they had a file you know that's from six months ago that we want to access and so you have to pay that reactivation fee on their gigabyte cost but then you have to pay the monthly cost recurring of whatever the gigabyte pool is for every single user within there so that could be the 100 accounts right in this example so in certain cases for customers that could be pretty hefty for SMB it might be pretty nominal but it's something that we have to consider now um as part of that the other big thing here is that if

9:15 we don't go to the user deletion wizard we just unlicense them if you don't have a retention policy it's automatically going to flow into that offboarding type of process that we saw with the deletion wizard where things will begin to start start automatically being deleted after roughly 180 days here right for adding up these uh two time frames here where it moves into recycle bin and then recycle bin has that 93 day period of retention if we do have a retention policy though if it's just un license it will also flow into the same flow here as you did with user deletion where you have to pay the fees to reactivate and then the monthly storage cost so some pretty hefty considerations there you can access an understand scope by going

10:00 into the SharePoint admin Center so let's pivot in there now to see what that looks like so within the SharePoint admin Center if you go under reports you have this one drive accounts here and this is going to tell you you know the unlicensed account number and then the storage quantity used so this will give you the indication of your monthly storage cost if you were to go ahead and have to activate that and then you have the unlicensed due to retention period and this this is from the sh settings as it states in the SharePoint admin Center that I showed you retention policy this is in purview or the compliance admin Center that I showed you active user with no license that's just that workflow of stripping the license not using the user deletion Wizard or removing the account after it's done and

10:47 then duplicate accounts which in most cases what you'll see with this is if you given full access to another member of the organization they actually get listed on that retention or on that One Drive account and it'll show his duplicate in there you'll be able to see that if you download this report U but this will show you the actual UPN right or the owners of the one drives you know that have that so you have a couple of considerations when it comes to what you're going to do and I didn't mention this at the beginning but also take note here as the aster that this does not apply if you are a edu GCC or DOD customer so I link my blog article below but here's some suggestions here and just some context it's really

11:32 straightforward versus what you get in that support article from Microsoft which is what happens if I take no action right what happens if you go through this flow and all of a sudden this exists now you're not going to automatically be forced into paying additional money let's just make that black and white you're just going to have to pay if you want to reactivate anything that's older than 93 days of being unlicensed and then you're going to have to pay for the monthly storage cost as well too the other important thing to note any unlicensed users that are in there that have sat Beyond 93 days are automatically going to be moved to recycle bin and then subsequently deleted so you basically have potentially you know like a thir 90day period um if this has been more than 93

12:18 days since they were unlicensed already where everything's just going to be blown away so it's important to take that into note and have these conversations with your customers and that kind of brings us to what are my options and really I think there there could be a lot here obviously based off of your clients your environments that you manage how things work today how you've communicated retention today from them but you could say that we're not going to do anything except inform the customers that this is going to be the new default retention policy things are automatically going to be blown away and if you want us to retain that it's going to come at a certain level of cost right and that's just going to be something that you know they take into consideration I do think that having

13:05 this 30-day um access for users as part of an sop for offboarding is sufficient plus you have an additional 93 days that admins have to grab from the recycle bin and that seems like it should be part of a default retention policy that's acceptable for an organization but understanding there could be some caveats when we talk to our sensitive lawyers or legal firms that want to retain data forever right or have Regulatory Compliance that makes them store for 3 years right and that should not be in somebody's one drive I just want to call that out that should be in a SharePoint site um it shouldn't be one person's one drive where we have sensitive pii but that's usually not the case and we don't know if that's the case right unless you do some heavy investigation the next option here that

13:51 we have is really to tell the client or have them sign a waiver that says they'll pay the additional storage cost and it's really saying that if you're not accepting that we have this retention of 93 days basically or the you know the 120 days if we talk about 30 plus 93 days then we don't know what the costs are going to be or if we're going to ever have to access files beyond that window and so it could be a very nominal fee of like 30 bucks a month right to be able to access those files after they're done you could look in and give them an indication today of what those costs are going to be but who knows how that changes over time and really you would want to agree upon a scoped retention policy for those one

14:37 drive accounts that you can periodically just start to blow those away I mean that should be part of any basic practice that you have on but that's another consideration there relying on thirdparty backup you know this is something that we all should have third party backup for our files and folders that are going to a separate location outside of Microsoft's cloud and you could use them to restore to a SharePoint Point site at a later time if needed likely you're going to be paying much less for that cold storage for those uh particular third party backups that are taking place but again just another option there and then the other one here is the consideration that you could license relicense a one Drive account that is part of a retention policy and you could reactivate it by

15:22 doing that without reactivating the entire pool that you're then paying the monthly cost on it could be much more coste effective if we talk about the cost of a single one drive license temporarily to reactivate it access the files and then go from there versus having a pool storage you know that you're you're using each month so those are the main considerations I wanted to cover here I hope this has been helpful I do have bunch of the references in here including the FAQ I think it's important to take a look at if you do have additional questions based off of your environment I'll link this blog in the description of the video but these are some subtle but important changes you guys need to pay attention to as always I appreciate you guys hopping in with me and I'll see you guys next week