back to article The unlicensed OneDrive free ride ends this month

Still keeping data in unlicensed OneDrive accounts of long-gone users? The time has come to act: The data could soon become inaccessible or even permanently deleted. Microsoft warned in 2024 that this day was coming. Beginning January 27, 2025, any OneDrive user account that has been unlicensed for more than 93 days will …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    you gotta think of the poor CEO

    who wants a new Gulfstream G5. Then all this makes sense. He just has to keep up with Bezos and friends as well as making sure he has an exit plan for when they come to deport him. Pity that Musk may survive the cull.

    Avoid MS if you can folks.

  2. Mentat74
    Trollface

    I wonder if anyone at Microsoft...

    Has looked between the couch cushions yet ?

  3. FIA Silver badge

    Why aren't customers billed by users and/or storage? Surely that would stop the problem?

    1. Version 1.0 Silver badge
      Holmes

      OneDrive was quit in my Windows 7 Professional world a year or so ago so I have been unable to access all the stored data. That has lead me to abandoning all Microsoft software and operating systems ever since. In the old days we only saw a few printer problems that got solved quickly - these days we see problems that destroy the environment. So I agree with an old quote ...

      "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -- Albert Einstein"

      1. PCScreenOnly

        Like, can be useful, don't trust

        Precaution

        I like it as a copy type tool, but I have it configured on a few laptops at home and ALL are set to download a local copy.

        I have it on a remote NAS as well, which in turn uses Resilio Sync to sync back to a different location on my server at home - and that has Backblaze

        So I have many copies

        Like

        I like it as it means the phones are nearly always uploading the pics - important for SWMBO, but it does sometime freeze on an iPhone

        Don't trust

        Sudden loss if their network goes down

        Them to not want to harvest any data

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        A co-worker had everything in their OneDrive account disappear - twice. It ignored the retention period and everything, like it was a brand new account.

        Yes, I put all my important work stuff in the OneDrive folder... but I also make a backup of that folder on my local hard drive. Not sure which is less reliable, OneDrive or spinning disk!

    2. Roland6 Silver badge

      As far as I knew they were/are.

      A non profit client uses their 10 premium and 300 basic grant like this. Given the rate of staff turnover it will be over a decade before they run out of basic licences. However, we can expect MS to change the licensing rules multiple times in that period.

      I suspect the issue is companies only buy sufficient licences for active users and have got used to/taken advantage of MS’s generous housekeeping policy. Interestingly, MS don’t seem to be giving a date for when the account is finally deleted from their archive…

  4. Bebu sa Ware
    Windows

    As much as tape has often been the bane of my life...

    at USD614.40 initially + USD50.12 per month thereafter for one terabyte a LTO-9 tape archive system might be a bit cheaper.

    I suspect that the real problem is no one in the organisation wants to manage the organisation's data that is the hands of its employees (aka the users) over the life of that data and user's employment. Most of the bytes sitting under a user's (or employee's) home directory is at best ephemeral but more likely humourous kitten pictures and other assorted crap.

    In many cases there isn't anyone specifically tasked to manage backup and archives (no Virginia they aren't the same thing) and everything is stored indiscriminately in the predictably vain hope that down the track records that are required might be retrieved.

    Ideally everything an employee does within the corporate information systems should reside at all times only within that system.

    "Personal" computers were perhaps the worst of many mistakes in corporate IT if only for the curse of Microsoft that they inflected on the rest of the world. That mistake compounded with cesspool that the "internet" became has brought us the shit everywhere, all at once and forever world we now must endure.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: As much as tape has often been the bane of my life...

      "I suspect that the real problem is no one in the organisation wants to manage the organisation's data"

      That sounds more like the real problem being that the manglement doesn't realise that its data is a company asset and should be as carefully safeguarded as any other. It's not a matter of wanting to manage - it should be somebody's job.

      1. Guy de Loimbard Silver badge
        Windows

        Re: As much as tape has often been the bane of my life...

        Totally agree.

        We have so much storage that no one feels they have to manage it as there's no real problem, until there is a change to licensing by MS.

        You should absolutely have someone managing this, however, as I've quoted or rather misquoted the great Grace Hopper "No-one understands the value of data yet", or something to that effect.

        Of course, once MS give monetary examples of how much data costs, then maybe manglement will start to address the issue, before it becomes a problem.... surely....? (YMMV)

    2. Brad Ackerman

      Re: As much as tape has often been the bane of my life...

      If you've got 100 TB to store and your on-premises servers are already in a class 8 datacenter, LTO-9 may make sense. I agree 100% about the lack of storage management; very few organizations that need to hire librarians are aware of that fact, and even the ones that are don't hire enough.

      Documents that aren't personal should be stored in SharePoint folders instead of OneDrive.

      (I'm a Microsoft employee but have no connection to or knowledge of M365 pricing or really almost anything that isn't public. If I had been offered Azure Blob Storage archive tier1 in Government Top Secret ten years ago when I had LTO-4 libraries, you bet I'd have been camping out in the procurement people's offices until they let me click the buy button.)

      1 Or the AWS/GCP/OCI/IBM Cloud equivalent. I left that position in 2013, when Amazon had just signed the first classified cloud computing contract with CIA and Microsoft was still calling it Windows Azure.2

      2 For reasons I still don't understand, it has been a low single-digit number of days since I've seen the phrase "Windows Azure" used in a production system, and it needs to stop.

      1. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: As much as tape has often been the bane of my life...

        > Documents that aren't personal should be stored in SharePoint folders instead of OneDrive.

        Bob, what a choice. Where would you like your documents to go to die?

        -A.

  5. Dave@Home

    Surely this is a Customer side problem?

    "That could make it tough to hand over the role to someone else, and in the worst case could create trouble from courts and regulators."

    If your business has data that might fall under these use cases, surely you should be looking to sort out a proper data management policy, not just dumping it on someone elses computer and hoping they don't delete it?

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: Surely this is a Customer side problem?

      Absolutey agree.

      If your data is important, it's up to you to ensure that you keep it.

      All this Cloud hoopla is just a good excuse for multi-billion-dollar companies to rake in the money and then leave you high and dry when the time comes to deliver.

    2. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: Surely this is a Customer side problem?

      Ned to invest in a proper document management system. It s not like these are something new, I was using and selling these for Windows clients back in the early 1990s…

      1. stiine Silver badge
        Coffee/keyboard

        Re: Surely this is a Customer side problem?

        Oh, it Ned's fault....figures.

    3. GlenP Silver badge

      Re: Surely this is a Customer side problem?

      Agreed - we archive OneDrive folders when someone leaves the company. It's largely a waste of time given how rarely anyone needs to access the data but we have it, just in case.

      1. DoctorPaul Bronze badge

        Re: Surely this is a Customer side problem?

        I think the key word there is "largely". In the handful of other cases, how deep in the shit would you have been without the data?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Surely this is a Customer side problem?

        Makes sense. And something like LTO tape, or even just a big hard drive you put in a safe when it's full, would be a good solution. This is data that usually won't ever need accessing, so there's no reason to keep it online/live. But needs to be on a medium that'll last years between reads (so no flash storage).

      3. edis

        Re: Surely this is a Customer side problem?

        Institutions, where I happen to be handling IT side, transfer duties and documents of the employees leaving, immediately - this way my task is to ensure, that new responsible does have copy of mail archives and the documents accumulated.

    4. JoeCool Silver badge

      Re: Surely this is a Customer side problem?

      No, it is a condition fabricated by M$ for obvious financial reasons.

      Leaving inactive accounts in place is a perfectly good data archiving solution.

      The data is NOT "dumped on someone's PC" it is on Onedrive, meaning that it is stored in the cloud.

      It may even be on your on-prem, privately managed cloud, but because it does not have a liscence from microsoft for the Onedrive user account, Onedrive will delete it.

      There is little justification or benefit from doing anything more than archiving the data, without a clear requirement or need.

      In the future, if someone comes along and needs to answer specific questions, say they want audit proof for a SOX compliance filing, then that person can apply the knowledge they have to go through the data.

      The data archiving guy has no hope of being able to categorize that data properly.

      1. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

        Re: Surely this is a Customer side problem?

        "Leaving inactive accounts in place is a perfectly good data archiving solution"

        Err, I wouldn't expect any inactive account to remain accessible, or even to remain in existence. It's the data equivalent of locking an employee's office door on the day they leave and giving them back the key.

  6. DownUndaRob

    Clarification Required

    Is this only for One Drive Business or is Personal involved also?

    Microsoft encouraged the use of Documents/Pictures etc into One Drive for home users, is this being rugpulled?

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: Clarification Required

      Personal OneDrive will most probably mirror Google Drive and iCloud:

      Google will deem an account inactive if it has not been accessed in 2 years and thus will delete it.

      iCloud it’s one year

      Onedrive it’s currently 2 years.

      Obviously, if you are using subscription storage (ie. More than 5GB) and fail to pay the subscription, data is erased much quicker.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Clarification Required

        Looked it up for you...

        https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/my-onedrive-says-it-s-full-f0a8a922-d971-497e-b0c6-7b9a47c617c0

        OneDrive

        Two years before account marked inactive

        Six months if you're over account quota (for example, if your subscription expired) data could be deleted with no possible recovery.

  7. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
    Facepalm

    The dog ate it

    and in the worst case could create trouble from courts and regulators.

    Sorry your honour, looks like after we dismissed the rogue employee Microsoft has deleted all the evidence

    1. James O'Shea Silver badge

      Re: The dog ate it

      Your Hono(u)r says:

      "You should have made an offline complete backup of every file that the rogue employee had before firing him, because basic data security dictates having complete offline backups of ALL files, period. Your failure to perform basic data security is not the Court's problem. Produce the files, forthwith or face charges of contempt of court. And fines of $100,000/day for each day that you fail to produce the evidence, starting right now; pay the bailiff today's $100,000 or go immediately to Holding and stay there until today's $100,000 is paid. You are also liable for charges of willful destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice, and being a pratt who thought that he could skate away from the consequences of willful stupidity in my courtroom."

      Wanna bet that a way to get the data from MS will be found, quickly?

      Note that at the office I have a quite extensive tape library. And a lot of write-once optical media. And some large spinning drives which are connected to the system, updated, then disconnected. Three different types of backups. Any file older than a few hours is on at least one of them. Cloudy Crap is not a backup method, it's a file-sharing method. Accounting has made noise about the expense in the past. I put in writing my opinion that it was best to have proper backups, but if Accounting felt the need to not have full backups and was willing to Put That Opinion In Writing, by all means I would get rid of one or more of my backup systems. Strangely, no-one in Accounting was willing to sign off on killing backups. Funny, that.

  8. captain veg Silver badge

    Unlicensed

    I've never used OneDrive and don't ever intend to, but can someone explain what an "unlicensed account" might be?

    For largely historical reasons software IP is protected by copyright instead of patent, by analogy with publishing. How does that apply to an account?

    Sure they can make me agree to conditions when signing up to the account, which makes it a contract*. Not a licence.

    -A.

    * Possibly not in English law, which requires consideration (money) to make a valid contract.

    1. katrinab Silver badge

      Re: Unlicensed

      Person joins the company. You create a Microsoft account for them, and pay for it.

      Person leaves. You cancel the Microsoft subscription for them. Then it becomes an unlicenced account.

      1. David Hicklin Silver badge

        Re: Unlicensed

        > Person leaves. You cancel the Microsoft subscription for them. Then it becomes an unlicenced account.

        But surly the data also becomes inaccessible at the same time?

        1. EnviableOne

          Re: Unlicensed

          the point is, until now it hasn't, MS has been giving away the cat pics for nothing and the bits for free.

          someone with VP in their title worked out how much that storage space was costing MS in lost revenue, and decided that it was a chance to pad those bonus $$$$

      2. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: Unlicensed

        Unsubscribed != unlicensed. The latter has a very specific meaning which is not the same as "hasn't paid for it".

  9. Blackjack Silver badge

    Again, always have offline backups.

  10. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

    Rob Helm, managing VP of research at Directions on Microsoft, said, "If you do nothing, a former employee's data will go offline and then disappear completely when you take back their license, not just when you take them out of the directory.

    "That could make it tough to hand over the role to someone else, and in the worst case could create trouble from courts and regulators."

    That... sounds a bit like a threat to me.

  11. ComicalEngineer

    I don't use OneDrive for several reasons:

    1/ A lot of my work is covered by NDAs some by erm - more binding agreements.

    2/ M$ could in theory access my files unless I encrypt everything and maybe even then.

    3/ No internet connection - no files - I often work remotely in locations with limited or no phone signal and no internet connections.

    4/ Do I trust M$ not to crash OneDrive someday or get hacked? NO.

    My data is backed up in 3 places including one machine that is air gapped from the internet and two separate external encrypted HDDs stored in different locations.

    Everything is backed up weekly.

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