OneDrive for Business: Retention Policy Gotcha!

/ Charles

Microsoft Office 365 user licenses can often be confusing. The cost per user, per month is clear…

Office 365 costs:

  • E5 is $35.00 user / month
  • E3 is $20.00 user / month
  • E1 is $8.00 user / month
  • F1 is $4.00 user / month
  • Etc.

But the differences in products, features, and limitations can muddy the waters a bit. We’re not hashing out those differences here. Instead, lets just look at the storage allocation for E3 and F1 licenses. The E3 license comes with 5 TB of storage. The F1 license only comes with 2 GB of storage.

Note: 5 TB > 2 GB

Personally, I think that the F1 license is ideal for front-line workers. These accounts are cheap and don’t require annual commitments. Additionally, they shouldn’t require too much storage space in their OneDrive accounts. Because of this, they should rarely (if ever) run out of storage. But, what if you applied a retention policy to these accounts? The policy keeps a copy of every deleted file. Each deleted file has a copy moved to:

{tenant}-my.sharepoint.com/{user-account}/PreservationHoldLibrary/

Why is this important? The Preservation Hold Library counts against their 2 GB storage limit! These accounts may hit their storage limit and need your help reclaiming their storage space. You’ll need to exclude their account from the policy before you can perform any heroics.

Full disclosure, this probably isn’t an ideal solution: Every OneDrive account has a Recycle bin and Second stage recycle bin. Deleting files from the Preservation Hold Library only moves them to the Recycle bin. Fun fact, this still counts against your OneDrive storage. Delete these files from the Recycle bin and they’re moved to the Second stage recycle bin. This doesn’t count against your storage. Storage space reclaimed! Oh, add this account back to the retention policy and educate your F1 licensed users. Most of what they’re working on should live within their respective SharePoint sites, not their OneDrive account.

Bonus Gotcha / Story time!

In an effort to simplify the end-user experience, a process was implemented to route all saved content into their OneDrive automatically:

  • Documents
  • Downloads
  • Music
  • Pictures
  • Etc.

Very helpful for the F1 licenses because their content will always be in OneDrive. Perfect! Except for those signed into Google Chrome. At the time, this automated process was also copying Chrome’s profile.pb file to their OneDrive. This file was literally being updated every few seconds for some.

Being maybe 32 KB wasn’t an immediate issue. However, after a week and 15K+ versions later, the cumulative size of the file was nearing 2 GB. What was our F1 license storage limit? Yep, 2 GB. When your OneDrive is completely full, you are stuck. Exclude this account from the retention policy, delete the profile.pb file, move it to the Second stage recycle bin, and add this account back to the policy. Done!

Conclusion: Good solutions can have unintended consequences. However, don’t shy away from trying things. Instead learn from them. If things break, then learn from the experience. Everything can be a teaching moment…

“Please show me a king that’s never suffered a loss. Or show me a man that never suffered a scar. And I’ll show you a man that’s never given his all. I’ll show you man that’s never given his heart.”

Christopher Don Wallace

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