Live data from Hacker News

OneDrive data now has an expiry date

ms365news.com

11–20 of 164 posts

Re: OneDrive data now has an expiry date

#11
The whole OneDrive ecosystem is scary as hell.

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...).

Re: OneDrive data now has an expiry date

#12
Protip: rclone[0] is the easiest way to get all your stuff out of OneDrive.

I did it about a year ago now and haven't looked back.

Just make sure you're running the latest rclone version, I had some major issues with Debian Stable's version failing in weird ways.

[0] https://rclone.org

Re: OneDrive data now has an expiry date

#13
post #7

This will have a huge impact on a lot of organisations, for example those that have a communal SharePoint, or shared document page: files shared from ex-employees for critical documentation is going to break.

AFAIK Sharepoint doesn't have these limitations. The idea is that in companies OneDrive should not be used for permanent stuff. Which is strange, to be granted, but after all using OneDrive for company documents basically means they are being shared out of some personal space that doesn't belong anywhere.

And if they haven't migrated the ownership of the OneDrive to another user's account in 12 months (such as cascading the drive up to the next manager to pull out whatever docs)... what kind of other bad IT and managerial practices are in use?

Re: OneDrive data now has an expiry date

#14
post #7

This will have a huge impact on a lot of organisations, for example those that have a communal SharePoint, or shared document page: files shared from ex-employees for critical documentation is going to break.

AFAIK Sharepoint doesn't have these limitations. The idea is that in companies OneDrive should not be used for permanent stuff. Which is strange, to be granted, but after all using OneDrive for company documents basically means they are being shared out of some personal space that doesn't belong anywhere.

>shared out of some personal space that doesn't belong anywhere

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)

Re: OneDrive data now has an expiry date

#15

> Let me paint a familiar picture. Someone leaves your organisation, or a licence gets removed as part of a cost-saving exercise. 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.

> Someone leaves your organisation

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.

Re: OneDrive data now has an expiry date

#17
post #11

The whole OneDrive ecosystem is scary as hell. 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...).

Whenever I was forced to interact with OneDrive, I couldn't help imagining the proverbial digital duct tape holding everything together behind the scenes.

Re: OneDrive data now has an expiry date

#18
One drive is an insanely poorly implemented solution to a problem nobody really had.

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.

Re: OneDrive data now has an expiry date

#19

> Let me paint a familiar picture. Someone leaves your organisation, or a licence gets removed as part of a cost-saving exercise. 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.

Also the deletion will kick in after 12 months

> 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

Post reply on HN