OneDrive: Granting access for a user to access another user's OneDrive cloud storage.
When staff leave the organisation, it may be necessary to get access to their OneDrive in order to retrieve files. This quick how-to explains exactly how to make that happen.
Introduction
On occasion, typically when staff leave the organisation, it may be necessary to give access to their OneDrive to another member of their team, or to an administrator, in order to retrieve files.
Of course, doing this in most organisations would require a sign off from the HR department. So check with them first.
An important note on retention periods.
Note that OneDrive’s default retention period is 30 calendar days.
After the 30 calendar days are up, all OneDrive contents from unlicensed accounts are lost and are not recoverable.
You must have recovered all files from the OneDrive before this retention period is up, or ensured that the account has been re-licenced and enabled before the end of the retention period.
I would strongly recommend increasing the retention period to something more sensible like 90, 120 or 180 days. This will also help with users who accidentally delete files. Microsoft explain how to do this clearly here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/set-retention
The actual process of granting access
First off, OneDrive is kind of just SharePoint Online in the backend. So you actually need to do this process within the SharePoint user profiles.
- Grant yourself SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator role within your Entra ID (Azure Active Directory) tenant.
- In the SharePoint Admin Centre > click More Features
- Under User Profiles > click Open
- Under People > click Manage User Profiles
- Search for and locate the user in question
- Right click the user > Manage Site Collection owners > Add the required account to Site Collection Admins (the second text field) > Save
- The last step, right click the user > Manage personal site. On here you'll see that this provides the link to the users OneDrive, which you can share with the user you've just granted access.
Most Microsoft cloud services can take some time for any permission changes to take effect, so give it a short while and your user should now have access. When you're telling the user this, I suggest informing them to wait an hour.
Conclusion
Hopefully this article has helped you to get those lost files back - no doubt for the team who's sweating it about losing that one particular XLSX that runs their whole department's operation, which for some reason wasn't in SharePoint (well, it kind of is in SharePoint, but you know what I mean).
Ryan Drake
Infrastructure Insider - Editor-in-Chief
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