Beginning on Jan 27th, 2025, any OneDrive user accounts in Microsoft 365 COMMERCIAL cloud instances that have been unlicensed for longer than 93 days will be inaccessible to admins & end users.
- For example, if a OneDrive account became unlicensed on August 1st, 2025, this account will be inaccessible as of Oct 1st, 2025.
Accounts become unlicensed when the admin removes the license, or the user is deleted from Entra ID. These accounts will be automatically archived and will still be viewable via admin tools but will not be accessible until admins take action on them through the following:
- Setting up the Archive billing for unlicensed accounts to be able to access and edit the archived files.
- Optionally re-license the unlicensed account to maintain access.
All Purview features will work with archived, unlicensed OneDrive accounts including retention policies, legal holds, and eDiscovery search & export, however to access the data that is eDiscovered or legally held, you MUST establish Microsoft 365 Archive billing or the content will not be extractable or downloadable.
To learn how to establish Archive billing, read more about this change below:
- Unlicensed OneDrive user accounts: What you need to know | Microsoft Community Hub
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/unlicensed-onedrive-user-accounts-what-you-need-to-know/4367835 - Manage unlicensed OneDrive user accounts – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/unlicensed-onedrive-accounts - MC836942 – Microsoft OneDrive: Update for unlicensed accounts
https://mc.merill.net/message/MC836942
(Note: This will apply to Microsoft 365 GCC/Government cloud instances in the future however a specific date is not set yet.)
kurtsh
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 
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