OneDrive data now has an expiry date(ms365news.com) |
OneDrive data now has an expiry date(ms365news.com) |
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.
I highly doubt that the need to steal as much data and media from people to train AI was a problem nobody really had.
Also that came out 10-13 years ago... way before AI. Why are people on this site such midwits?
Back when I had to work with it I found a bug that could cause folders to become un-synced without you realising, meaning changes would not be tracked and cause merge-conflicts when it was fixed.
Managed to use our Gold partner tickets to raise the issue with the product team, they flat out refused to fix the issue even knowing it was a bug. This was back in 2020 or so, I wonder if they ever fixed that bug. It's pretty simple to reproduce:
1. - Sync a nested subfolder from Sharepoint
2. - Sync the parent folder
3. - Note that the folder synced in 1. is not longer being tracked (no checkmark)
4. - Normal users will now go to folder 1. by default and have no idea none of their changes are no longer being tracked now that it's being synced within folder 2.
SharePoint is by far the worst piece of software I've ever used. Like, there's no mental model to be done, not intuitive, not working, files disappear from time to time, and I could go on for hours
YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.
OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.
>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.
Probably enterprise config. Standard OneDrive office 365 enterprise with SharePoint can absolutely work over the "normal internet", you dont need a "network that's safe" whatever that means. VPN? Anyway the big office 365 win was it will work over the normal internet without running /owa open on your exchange server.
In my previous job there was an app(by Dell EMC I think) that would run every day at lunch and backup all your user document folders to some company network drive.
I also lost data on their platform. Not sure why anyone would like to still use them. This follows a pattern of Microsoft mishandling their user's data. They even routinely delete code hosted on their servers when they shutdown services without handling the migration well.
I'm building a digital document archive organizer platform that relies on users' own local machine storage and their cloud storage, and the only provider I trust to support are s3-compatible storage and Google drive (much as I'm wary of Google, Gdrive is reliable). Dropbox, Box, etc are also ok, but the storage is kind of expensive.
I would never support OneDrive.
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...).
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.
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.
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.
AI;DR: Starting from early July 2026, all associated data will be deleted 12 Months after a user license is removed.
Took me 10 seconds to find this: https://mc.merill.net/message/MC1381110
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).
Do you care explaining this better?
(moreover, to this day I still can't understand the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive -- if there's any)
It comes up with a scenario where it could be a problem ( license removal ), and then it generates why a license might get removed ( "cost-saving" ).
It's not a person thinking, so there's no real thought to whether it is really a likely scenario, it's just something that sounds plausible.
I read too many blogs, I've come to spot these phrases that trip a feeling of, "Wait, do people really do that?".
You'll still have someone along in the comments to suggest that this article isn't AI slop, and that people really do remove individual one-drive licenses from active people in an organisation to cut costs, that this is just "edited" by AI, etc.
But it's slop from start to finish. Or in LLM speak, "The slop is real".
This was just after a few minutes of video and I didn't finish watching it. At a quick glance, I didn't see anybody else pointing this out in the comments. Disappointing.
How can I be so certain about LLM usage after just a few minutes? It's both the fact that it sounded like slop, and the fact that I intuitively know his real writing style from past years, and it simply sounded very different this time.
An article about OneDrive being substantially LLM written is sort of okay (who cares about OneDrive by some Office365 blog), but if people you thought you like resort to these methods I feel betrayed.
> Day 1: licence removed or user deleted: The clock starts. The OneDrive account is now unlicensed and the retention countdown begins.
> Day 60: read-only mode: No more edits.
So yeah if you spend 12 months without realizing you might need the data of someone who left then I think that's on you
For years, enterprises have been conditioned to lean into OneDrive and forget about it. Indeed, that dark pattern is a festering disease across consumer Windows.
This is classic Microsoft long rug pull.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/retention-and-d...
"By default, when a user is deleted, the user's manager is automatically given access to the user's OneDrive"
Seems like it should be enough time to firesale the data out you need as a manager.
Laptop drives are still 256 or 512GB in office work.
No real need to pay for "higher subs"
All of these kinds things need protection against data loss and centralized control+management, not just the user folder alone.
For large enterprises that old architecture you refer to means long lead times on network and storage outage notifications, and huge fallout if an outage window is blown.
And if the building network goes down, or if your storage servers are located off site because you’re too big for one building and the commercial internet goes down, etc etc
But it doesn’t have to be OneDrive. There are many other options. I run ownCloud 10 for my personal files. If I were a small to medium business, I would look hard at OCIS.
YES, you can do GPO redirect desktop etc to network drive but needs a VPN and sync is also slow.
OneDrive has solved this, like it or not.
See "sites" in the URL? That's a sharepoint site (AKA teams "shared" folder).
The former disappears (after a year) when the user license is removed. The latter is not associated with an individual user, so even if everyone in a team leaves the company it isn't just automatically removed.
Onedrive is a product that Microsoft bought. It was a box.com/dropbox/g-drive competitor. Microsoft moved Onedrive's backend to Sharepoint some time after the acquisition. As a result it's a bit more integrated, but in unexpected and counterintuitive ways.
I then saw they've always written like that, and always posted 2-3 articles a day, so I figured they're prolific and LLMs copied their style.
Then I read their first post again, and realised I should check the wayback machine.
Sure enough, they had gone through their entire post history, and had rewritten it with an LLM, to make it less obvious when they started using them.
Now, this was always a bit of a junk site, a knock-off Boing Boing, but it seems incredible to me that someone would replace their original posts with AI gen.
Surely it destroys any reputation you might have?
A site they've been running for nearly 20 years, overwritten by slop.
Compare:
Original: https://web.archive.org/web/20191017113113/https://www.geeky...
Rewritten slop: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/metal-detecting-sandals/