Switching Accounts in SharePoint Online Admin Center My Sites Cleanup does not Remove Old Accounts

Question

Question: When you switch accounts in the SharePoint Online Admin Center, User Profiles, My Sites Cleanup, do the old accounts remain as secondary owner / secondary admin?

Background information:

When you switch accounts in the SharePoint Online Admin Center, User Profiles, My Sites Cleanup, do the old accounts remain as secondary owner / secondary admin?

Background information:

Some years ago, I set up SharePoint Online for a GCC tenant and entered my account as Secondary Owner and Secondary Admin under My Sites, here:

SharePoint Admin Center > More features > User profiles > Setup My Sites > My Site Cleanup: Secondary Owner and Secondary Admin

(Link: https://tenantnamehere-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/Online/PersonalSites.aspx?PersonalSitesOverridden=1)

Over the years, I was given a new account, and I switched the My Site Cleanup accounts to the new account and then later to a generic SharePoint Admin account.

Recently, some users reported that all three accounts show as having permission when a folder or file is shared from personal OneDrives.

Please confirm -- When you switch My Sites Cleanup accounts, do the old accounts remain? If yes, then I would assume best practice would be to run a PowerShell script to remove the old accounts.

I am looking for verification as I cannot find anything about it in Microsoft's documentation.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Hi @Kim Ryan,

When you switch My Sites Cleanup accounts in the SharePoint Online Admin Center, the old accounts do not remain as secondary owner or secondary admin. The new account specified as the secondary owner will be appointed as the owner of the OneDrive if the user's manager isn't set in Microsoft Entra ID. Email notifications will also be sent to the secondary owner account when the value is populated. Therefore, there is no need to run a PowerShell script to remove the old accounts.

Reference:

• OneDrive retention and deletion

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept as Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.