Microsoft has an important warning about unlicensed OneDrive accounts

Unlicensed accounts on OneDrive

Microsoft has put out a warning for administrators of OneDrive accounts because on January 27, Unlicensed OneDrive user accounts that have not been used for 93 days will become inaccessible to admins and end users. Microsoft said that unlicensed accounts are those that have had their license removed by an admin or those where the user has been deleted from Entra ID.

The Windows maker said that admins have a few ways to deal with the upcoming changes, they are:

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.

The Redmond giant said unlicensed accounts will automatically get archived. To access the files, admins need to enable unlicensed account billing in the Microsoft 365 admin center. It also said that accounts in the archive incur a fee of $0.05 per GB per month, and if you want to reactivate an account, there is another fee of $0.60 per GB.

The following costs, which did not exist before, now exist:

Storage Fees: Archived unlicensed accounts now incur a storage fee of $0.05 per GB per month.

Reactivation Costs: Reactivating an archived account costs $0.60 per GB, providing 30-day access.

Operational Expenses: Managing unlicensed accounts involves additional administrative tasks and costs.

Compliance and Security: Properly archiving and billing unlicensed accounts helps mitigate security and compliance risk.

Admins can find out how many unlicensed accounts there are by going to SharePoint admin center>Reports>OneDrive accounts. Here, they can also find information about why the accounts are archived.

The company also said that EDU tenants are not affected by these changes if they have over 50% education licenses. Microsoft said it considers anything less than this to be commercial rather than educational and will be hit by the changes.

To read more, check out Microsoft's announcement.