I think there are a number of kinks to workout when this feature goes live. We’ve had 10+ years of OneDrive account retention for free and people will have done many strange and wonderful things in that time. We’ll find all those things out as the software starts to work. I do like the policy of emptying OneDrive before someone leaves. It makes perfect sense to handover or delete documents before someone walks out the door.

Another curious issue that arises is from shared mailboxes where we have added a licence (which includes OneDrive) for a period of time when we need to use the shared mailbox directly (i.e. hosting teams meetings) but then removed the licence later on. Now the unlicensed OneDrive report shows a handful of these shared mailboxes. It will be interesting to see if the OneDrives eventually get deleted – all but one are at 0MB anyways.

Well, you can’t delete a OneDrive account if it is covered by a retention policy. If it’s not, then you can remove it at any time or let it go into the archive.

That’s my understanding. Things will be much clearer when the actual code is available.

So if I’m understanding this correctly, if for example you had a Purview retention policy that kept all deleted OneDrive accounts forever, the accounts would be moved to the M365 archive, but they would never be deleted due to the retention policy being honoured and would still be searchable and data could be exported using eDiscovery Content Search?

Cheers

Is there anyway we can delete the OneDrive site while the status on the report is set to “Owner deleted from Entra ID”

Absolutely, and if the account is subject to a retention hold, it will be held and not be deleted.

My point about using inactive mailboes is that using this method (rather than converting a mailbox to be a shared mailbox) performs more clean-up, like removing accounts from distribution groups, teams, etc.

It appears there may be an alternate method to delete inactive OneDrive storage for a user and keep the shared mailbox without deleting the user account using SharePoint Online Management Shell and the OneDrive site URL:

Remove-SPOSite -Identity “https://-my.sharepoint.com/personal/username_domain”

where Identity is the OneDrive site URL from the unlicensed OneDrive CSV report.

To be fair, it’s only taken Microsoft 12 years to make the decision to force people to pay…

Thanks for the info. No more ignoring content; Microsoft is now encouraging you to make a decision or pay for the consequences.

I recommend using inactive mailboxes rather than converting mailboxes into shared mailboxes: https://office365itpros.com/2024/07/22/ex-employee-mailboxes-choice/

If you use inactive mailboxes, you can delete the user account and have the OneDrive account removed at the same time.

After talking the issue through with some contacts, it seems like the 180 days is an attempt by Microsoft to clean up old OneDrive accounts that a tenant obviously doesn’t want because the tenant is unwilling to pay a minimal storage cost for their retention. I’ll update the text.

Aha, now I know what you’re referring to. The 180 days referred to there is no covered in any Microsoft documentation that I can find (my search capabilities might be limited). But anyway, retention policies take precedence and are explicitly covered in the documentation.

Thanks for the information and reply. The “180 days after becoming unlicensed” sentence is located in the explanation text in the GUI (Figure 1), although is true it is more detailed when you open the documentation with the different scenarios.

In their documentation, Microsoft says:

5. How does it impact Retention Policy, Retention Setting, or Litigation Hold?
Answer: Archived OneDrive accounts fully honor retention policies, settings, and litigation holds. For example, if your company has a 5-year retention policy, it remains unchanged whether the OneDrive account is active or archived. Archiving does not reset the timeline of the retention policy or holds.

Where is the source for the statement about accounts being deleted 180 days after becoming unlicensed?

An account can stay in Microsoft 365 Archive even when you don’t connect an Azure subscription to use Archive. If you just want to keep the data, that’s fine. But if you want to access the data (using a client), you need a subscription.

4. How does it impact eDiscovery in Microsoft Purview?
Answer: Microsoft Purview eDiscovery and Content Search will still be discoverable in archived content. You will need to reactivate any archived sites first to access content, and then an export option will be available. Files with retention policies will follow standard procedures of deletion and restoration.

What it is not fully clear for me is the sentence “if you don’t opt-in [do nothing and don’t setup Microsoft Archive], these accounts may be deleted after 180 days of being unlicensed”.
Based on that, since Microsoft can’t delete something with a retention policy applied, just wondering what means the sentence “If no action is taken, the account remains archived through Microsoft 365 Archive.”… in the scenario when you don’t have Microsoft Archive enabled..
Will they remain inaccesible until you setup Microsoft Archive? At the end, will we need to enable the Archive if we want to run an ediscovery case? I think the answer is at the beginning of my comment 🙂