Microsoft is making changes to the rules for using the OneDrive storage service. Now organizations that use OneDrive for work or educational purposes will have to pay for unlicensed (without an active license) accounts.
Starting January 27, 2025, any user account that remains unlicensed for more than 90 days will be automatically archived and Microsoft will charge a monthly fee of $0.05 per GB for storage. In this state, the data will be inaccessible to both administrators and end users until the organization turns on unlicensed billing and pays a fee of $0.60 per GB to reactivate the account. If storage payments stop, the account will be deleted within 93 days.
Microsoft explains the changes in its rules by security measures. The company claims that unlicensed OneDrive accounts can «create security and compliance risks, as well as create confusion and duplicate files». An unlicensed account is any account that is not associated with a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription. An account can lose its license and become unlicensed when a license expires, is not activated, or is not assigned. For example, when a student uses OneDrive for schools, their license expires and the account becomes unlicensed.
At this point, the organization should delete the account, but sometimes this does not happen, which can create security risks that Microsoft points out. With this new policy, organizations will have an incentive to stay on top of account management to avoid automatic archiving and associated storage costs.
There is a grace period for accounts that become archived. If the organization reactivates the account within 7 days, it will not be charged the $0.60 per GB reactivation fee. Once an account is archived, it can also be deleted without first reactivating it, as long as the account is not subject to any retention policy. Or, if the organization wants to keep the account and is willing to pay the retention fee, it is also perfectly acceptable to keep it archived for an extended period of time.
After January 27, any account that loses its license will have 90 days before it is archived, but for any account that lost its license before October 26, 2024, archiving can occur anytime between the end of January and the end of March 2025. This means that organizations need to sort out their unlicensed accounts between now and January. In the SharePoint Admin Center, the list of unlicensed accounts should be available from August 16, 2024.
Source: xda-developers
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