Webinar Recap: Managing Unlicensed OneDrive Accounts Effectively

Last Thursday, I did a webinar with ShareGate covering the upcoming changes for unlicensed OneDrives: Race against the OneDrive clock: How to stay ahead of Microsoft’s deadline

I tried to cover many aspects of the upcoming changes, which are primarily outlined in this article from Microsoft: Manage unlicensed OneDrive user accounts – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn To me, the article tries to cover too much, which makes it pretty confusing. I had to read sections of it multiple times to understand the details. I did it, so hopefully you don’t have to. Check out the video if you need to understand things better. Yes, you’ll need to register, but these are our ShareGate friends, and they use your contact info judiciously.

These changes were announced last August, but many people missed it or decided to kick it down the road. Well, we’re getting to the fork in that road where we need to act on this.

With questions during the webinar and from our contact form at Ask Sympraxis there are a couple of things I don’t think covered well enough. Here are some questions I’d like to answer.

Regarding the upcoming archive change for OneDrive, will unlicensed OneDrives under Legal Hold be archived? We do not have PAYG storage set up, we use default retention, but my concern is about our Legal Hold content. Thanks!

From this section of the above article, we know that “Archived OneDrive accounts fully honor retention policies, settings, and litigation hold and eDiscovery hold. For example, if your company has a five-year retention policy, it remains unchanged whether the OneDrive account is active or archived. Archiving doesn’t reset the timeline of the retention policy or holds.”

Several people ask some variant of this question, which is also sort of implied in the question above:

Microsoft Archive requires you to setup a subscription for the pay-as-you-go service. If an organisation hasn’t done this, do we know where these charges go?

or

For us it says “Enable billing to reactivate archived OneDrive accounts.” in the Admin Center. So I guess we are “ok” as long as we do not enable billing?

First off, it’s important to note that OneDrive storage is not at all connected to SharePoint storage. The amount of storage we have available in the SharePoint Admin Center is only for SharePoint, not for OneDrives.

I didn’t know the definitive answer to this question, but I assumed that Microsoft would automatically enable Microsoft Archive if you had OneDrives which need to be archived due to retention polices or some other reason that would require them to kept after your tenant is affected by this change.

According to a contact at Microsoft, if you don’t set up Microsoft Archive, your unlicensed OneDrives which need to be archived will be archived. Without PAYGO, you won’t be charged for the storage for those OneDrives. If you need to reactivate any of that content, though, you’ll need to enable PAYGO for Microsoft Archive. See this article about how to Set up Microsoft 365 Archive – Microsoft 365 Archive | Microsoft Learn You can also check out the official word on this from Microsoft in this OneDrive Customer Office Hours | March 2025 recording, specifically at 11:53.

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Have other questions? Feel free to ask them in the comments and I’ll add to the post.

Resources

• Manage unlicensed OneDrive user accounts
• Manage unlicensed OneDrive user accounts (FAQs)
• Overview of Microsoft 365 Archive
• Set up Microsoft 365 Archive – Microsoft 365 Archive | Microsoft Learn
• Pricing model for Microsoft 365 Archive
• Microsoft 365 Archive Eliminates Reactivation Fees by March 31, 2025
• OneDrive Customer Office Hours | March 2025