How do I recover documents from a terminated employee's OneDrive

[Christopher Clay]

I am running into a situation where I have a terminated employee, and OneDrive kicks off its automatic process of making the listed manager the Admin of the account thus granting access to the OneDrive.

My question is after I get to this point, how is the "manager" supposed to download the files and move them to their OneDrive?

The only way I have found is to download one file at a time and then upload to another OneDrive, and this isn't a very efficient method.

Any ideas or thoughts?

[#2]

You can use the Open with explorer functionality or bulk select files and press the Download button. Well in theory at least, as the download option doesnt seem to be working properly for me atm :)

Would be nice if the Copy/Move functionality actually exposed the option to copy the files to *your* ODFB library or anything other than Groups...

[#3]

I actually use Sharegate for just this type of move of files between OneDrives. To me it's worth the cost in what I save in agrevation.

[#4]

Other alternatives:
(1) Build a PowerShell script that copies files from one ODFB to another one.
(2) Use SPFilezilla

[#5]

Are you too an SPFilezilla fan !?

[#6]

We've also started giving the managers the option of putting an indefinite eDiscovery hold on the OneDrive site, that will prevent O365 from deleting it after 30 days. I know you can also extend the deletion time frame indefinitely.

Most of the time, we find managers think they want all the files, then just copy them over and never look at them again, and it bulks up their OneDrive, so we encourage just going into the original OneDrive anytime they think they need something.

[#7]

I tried this but then I ran into an error saying that access was denied. This only happens with some of my users and we can't find the root cause to this.

What I ended up doing was syncing the OneDrive locally and then doing the copy from one account to the Other.

This just isn't the best solution for something like this.
There should be an easier way to recover files from a terminated user.

[#8]

Wouldn't this practice soak up a lot of storage space over time?

[#9]

We don't have a huge user base, so probably not as much of an impact to us, but hypothetically it could. But with indefinite storage pretty much offered in all enterprise OD4B accounts, it doesnt seem to be of any concern to Microsoft.

[#10]

When the manager browse to the leaver's OneDrive URL, Click on "Return to classic OneDrive" in the bottom left. Then in the classic OD web Interface, manager can copy and move from the leaver's OneDrive back to their own OneDrive.

These features were broken in the new OneDrive interface.

[#11]

I really wish there was some form of baked in functionality with this.  I play the game with converting users mailboxes to shared mailboxes now.  I can see this being painful in the future.  I guess this is one way to keep me using low amount of data for quotas.