Forum Discussion
OneDrive site locked NoAccess for 1 month - Ticket #2605040040008376 - No resolution
After six weeks, we have successfully regained access to the departed user's archived OneDrive account and recovered the shared folder.
The unlicensed OneDrive account, archived due to Microsoft's own enforcement policies, combined with a retention policy deadlock, was ultimately resolved by enabling Microsoft 365 Archive billing and submitting a reactivation request (After setting up a Pay as you Go subscription). This solution was not identified or communicated to us until very late in the process, despite being documented in Microsoft's own support articles.
While we are relieved and grateful that the issue has been resolved, we feel it is important to provide honest and constructive feedback to Microsoft on the overall support experience for quality assurance purposes:
- Improve frontline support training on unlicensed OneDrive archival scenarios
- Establish clear escalation timelines. It is inconceivable that cases go more than a week without tangible technical progress
- Proactively notify administrators of the real status facts related to the case, for instance, when OneDrive accounts are approaching archival due to unlicensed status
- Consider waiving reactivation fees for cases where archival occurs during an active support engagement
We remain committed Microsoft 365 customers and appreciate the eventual resolution of this issue. However, we strongly encourage Microsoft to review this case as an example of where the support process fell short of the service levels expected by a paying enterprise customer.
We hope this feedback helps improve the experience for other customers facing similar issues in the future.
Hi Ikadirozcan,
Thank you so much for taking the time to review our case and share your insights, it is greatly appreciated.
You are absolutely right in your assessment. Here is the current state based on your questions:
Get-SPOSite currently reports:
- LockState: NoAccess (despite Set-SPOSite -LockState Unlock completing without errors)
- Status: Active
Regarding the retention policy propagation, we removed the site from the Default 5-year retention policy at the beginning (one month ago), so propagation should have had sufficient time to complete by now. However the LockState remains unchanged.
This confirms exactly what you described, the unlock command succeeds but nothing actually changes, strongly suggesting there is still a compliance or retention related process holding the site at the backend level that is not visible or accessible from the admin side.
Regarding escalation to the SharePoint Online engineering team this is precisely what we have been requesting for over a month through our support ticket. The support team keeps confirming escalation, asking what seem to be like generic information gathering rather than focused technical troubleshooting; but we have not seen any backend engineering action yet.
We completely agree this does not appear to be a standard administrative lock and requires Microsoft engineering intervention.
If anyone in the community has encountered a similar retention policy deadlock scenario and found a resolution, we would be very grateful to hear about it.
Thank you again for your help!