Extending the retention period of OneDrive for Business for a deleted user for 10 years

[VigneshGanesan]

Hi All ,

  As far as I know once a user's account is deleted as a part of his exit , the OneDrive deletion timer job will run and make his manager as the primary admin for his OneDrive for Business folder and the content will be preserved for the next 30 days .Recently, a year back Microsoft has announced that the retention policy can be extended upto a year and I even wrote the below article on this .However, I also read somewhere that this has been extended to 10 years so a user's OneDrive for Buiness folder will be preserved for next 10 years . So, I  would like if it's true that the retention can be extended upto 10 years and who can have access to his OneDrive for business folder for the next 10 years ? We as an organization are looking for this option and would like to know in detail about this as well as the support for this . As a part of the leaver process the user's account as well as the license would be gone and we would only like to preserve the user's OneDrive for Business content for the next 10 years .

https://vigneshsharepointthoughts.com/2017/03/23/extending-the-retention-period-of-orphaned-personal...

[#2]

I can confirm this works. You set the retention in the OneDrive admin center. License removed from users and you can still access the OneDrive site. If you don’t have access you can powershell a site collection admin to the site to access it.

[#3]

Does this apply to E1 and E3 licensed users. Thanks

[#4]

@Deleted my boss likes this idea for retired users or terminated users. is there a tutorial or a place to find this in action that you know about?

[#5]

@VigneshGanesan Recently we had a similar issue and OneDrive got deleted after 45 days (retention set in our tenant). However for some critical reason we had to recover that so we found a power-shell to recover this from recycle bin (where it will be available for 83 days).

To find out if the site is in recycle bin, run the following commands

Connect-SPOService -Url https://domain-admin.sharepoint.com [authenticate with the SPO admin creds]

Get-SPODeletedSite -IncludePersonalSite

=>you can save the output in the .txt file and see if any of the sites returned are matching the UPN for the deleted users

=>If yes, you can restore the sites using the command Restore-SPODeletedSite -Identity URL