Starting January 27, 2025, OneDrive accounts that are unlicensed for more than 93 days will be inaccessible to admins and users.
That typically happens, when an account becomes “unlicensed”.
i.e. an Administrator removes the license or the user’s Entra ID gets deleted.
These accounts are automatically archived and can still be viewed through the admin tools, but will not be accessible until admins take action.
🔒 Organizations that don’t have a licensing and archiving strategy may risk data loss and unexpected costs!
An example of this is if a OneDrive account was no longer licensed on August 1, 2025, that account will no longer be accessible from October 1, 2025.
the good thing is:
Do admins get notified ahead of time when an account is going to be unlicensed?
Yes, admins are notified ahead of time when user accounts are about to become unlicensed in OneDrive.
Impact for administrators?
Beginning on January 27th, 2025, admins will have three options for managing unlicensed OneDrive accounts:
- Setting up the Archive billing for unlicensed accounts to be able to access and edit the archived files.
- Delete the unlicensed OneDrive account, if it does not have a retention policy applied to it.
- Re-license the unlicensed account to maintain access.
All purview features work with archived unlicensed OneDrive accounts, including retention policies, legal holds, and eDiscovery search & export.Â
read more here on the offical Microsoft OneDrive Blog:
Unlicensed OneDrive user accounts: What you need to know | Microsoft Community Hub
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