Unlicened onedrive retention period and read-only

Question

Based on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/unlicensed-onedrive-accounts

For accounts unlicensed after enforcement begins, each account will be put into read-only mode on the 60th unlicensed day and will be archived or moved to the recycle bin on the 93rd unlicensed day.

Can we shorten the dates where this is happening? is this the retention period? can the read-only mode date also be changed? ideally we want lincesned onedrives to be set to read-only in 1 day and then moved to recycle bin after 30 days.

Answer 1

Hi @DM,  

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A forum. 

You are inquiring whether it is possible to shorten the enforcement timeline for unlicensed OneDrive accounts to trigger a read-only state after 1 day and move data to the recycle bin after 30 days. 

Based on official Microsoft documentation, Microsoft documents a specific timeline for newly unlicensed accounts, entering read-only mode on the 60th unlicensed day and being moved to the archive or recycle bin on the 93rd day. While these milestones are clearly defined for the service, Microsoft does not have a tenant setting to change the 60th- or 93rd-day triggers. 

To achieve a timeline closer to your requirement of "30 days then recycle bin," I recommend distinguishing between an unlicensed account and a deleted account, as their lifecycles differ:

• Configure deleted-user retention: in case your goal is to move data to the recycle bin after 30 days, this behavior aligns with the deleted-user lifecycle. You can configure this by navigating to the SharePoint Admin Center > Settings > Retention. Locate the setting "Days to retain a deleted user's OneDrive" and set the value to 30.
• Manual read-only implementation: Since the 60-day read-only trigger cannot be shortened, you will need to apply governance controls manually. You can use the SharePoint Online Management Shell to immediately place a OneDrive site into a ReadOnly lock state with the following command: Set-SPOSite -Identity <OneDriveSiteURL> -LockState ReadOnly 

Please note that any existing Microsoft 365 retention policies or eDiscovery holds will continue to be honored and will override these deletion timelines if the data is subject to a legal hold.

If you do not have the necessary permissions to run these scripts, I recommend providing these steps to your IT administrator to implement a custom governance workflow. 

I hope this helps clarify the available options for managing unlicensed account timelines. Thank you for your patience and your understanding. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

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