TABLE OF CONTENTS
With Microsoft OneDrive, you can easily and securely store and access your files from all your devices. You can work with others regardless of whether they're inside or outside your organization and terminate that sharing whenever you want. OneDrive helps protect your work through advanced encryption while the data is in transit and at rest in data centers. OneDrive also helps ensure that users adhere to your most rigorous compliance standards by enabling them to choose where their data lives and providing detailed reporting of how that data has changed and been accessed. OneDrive connects you to your personal and shared files in Microsoft 365, enhancing collaboration capabilities within Microsoft 365 apps. With OneDrive on the web, desktop, or mobile, you can access all your personal files plus the files shared with you from other people or teams, including files from Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.
Why deploy OneDrive?
OneDrive provides a robust but simple-to-use cloud storage platform for small businesses, enterprises, and everything in between. Unlike other cloud storage providers, most of the advanced enterprise-focused features in OneDrive are available for every subscription type, enabling companies to use OneDrive in whatever way benefits their business the most – whether that's simply a cloud-based file share for a small business or a highly utilized storage system that provides the basis for all collaboration within an enterprise. At its core, however, OneDrive enables you to securely share and work together on all your files. With OneDrive, you can:
Access files from all your devices. Access all your personal files and those files others share with you on all your devices, including mobile, Mac, and PC as well as in a web browser.
Share inside or outside your organization. Securely share files with people inside or outside your organization by using their email address, even if they don't have a Microsoft Services Account. This common sharing experience is available in the web, mobile, and desktop versions of OneDrive.
Collaborate with deep Microsoft Office integration. Document coauthoring is available in Office for the web, Office mobile apps, and Office desktop apps, helping you maintain a single working version of any file. Only OneDrive provides coauthoring capabilities in Office apps across all your devices.
Quickly find files that matter most. Finding content in your OneDrive is simplified through the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph application programming interface. This technology simplifies finding what's important by providing file recommendations based on your relationship to other people, how you received various files, and when you last accessed them.
Protect your files with enterprise-grade security. OneDrive has many security and compliance features, enabling you to meet some of the strictest compliance requirements out there.
The Microsoft 365 family of products, which includes Office, Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, and Yammer, provides a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees. Together, the Microsoft 365 applications unlock creativity and encourage teamwork through product integration and a simple user experience, all while providing intelligent security to help keep your data safe. In addition, Microsoft Graph enables you to interact with and report on the data within many of the Microsoft 365 applications.
Key OneDrive features
Unlike most other cloud storage providers, OneDrive makes most of its advanced features available to all subscription types. This gives smaller organizations the flexibility to use standard features out of the box, and configure advanced features based on the needs of their organization.
The features listed in this section address common customer concerns or specific compliance requirements, or provide unique functionality available only in OneDrive:
Known Folder Move
Files On-Demand
Modern attachments
Real-time team collaboration: Coauthoring in full versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
Seamlessly connecting files to conversations
Files Restore
Recycle bin
Data loss prevention (DLP)
eDiscovery
Auditing and reporting
Encryption of data in transit and at rest
Customer-controlled encryption keys
Customer Lockbox
Hybrid integration with SharePoint Server
Multi-geo data residency
Government cloud
For a full list of feature availability across OneDrive plans, see Microsoft OneDrive. More in-depth descriptions for some of these features follow.
Known Folder Move
Known Folder Move makes it easier to move files in your users' Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders to OneDrive. This lets users continue working in the folders they're familiar with and access their files from any device. It also helps you make sure your users' files are backed up in the cloud if anything happens to their device. For more info, see Redirect and move Windows known folders to OneDrive.
Files On-Demand
OneDrive Files On-Demand enables users to view, search for, and interact with files stored in OneDrive from within File Explorer without downloading them all to their device. The feature provides a seamless look and feel for both OneDrive and local files without taking up space on the local hard drive. Files that have not been downloaded have a cloud icon for their status, as shown below. For those files that have been downloaded, the status shows a green checkmark.
Natively, files will be downloaded only when you need to access them. However, if you plan to access a file while disconnected from the internet, you can make the file available offline by right-clicking it, and then selecting Always keep on this device. Alternatively, if you want to free space on your device and remove the downloaded copy of a file, right-click the file, and then select Free up space. The following image shows the right-click menu for OneDrive files on a computer running the Windows operating system.
For more info about OneDrive Files On-Demand, see Learn about OneDrive Files On-Demand.
Modern attachments
OneDrive integrates with Outlook to allow seamless sharing of OneDrive files that appear just like email attachments. This feature provides a familiar sharing experience but centralizes storage of attachments in OneDrive, providing collaborative benefits such as version control typically lost when users email documents back and forth. In addition, you can configure sharing permissions on the files directly from within the Outlook app. For an example of a document in OneDrive being attached as a link to an email, as well as the experience of changing the sharing permissions on the link, see the following image.
To reduce the potential for confusion when users choose to add a copy versus a link to attached OneDrive files, you can set the default behavior of the Outlook app, as demonstrated in How to control default attachment state when you attach a cloud file in Outlook.
Files Restore
The OneDrive Files Restore feature enables users to restore files to any point over the past 30 days. To select the desired recovery time, OneDrive presents users with a histogram that shows file activity so that they can determine which recovered time meets their needs. From there, users can select the file history entry to which they want to restore, and all changes after that point will be rolled back. The following image shows the Files Restore experience for a user.
In addition, because the histogram shows individual activity on a file, users can employ this feature to quickly view their files' modification history. For more info about this feature, see Restore your OneDrive.
Recycle bin
OneDrive has a recycle bin similar to the one available on the Windows desktop. Deleted files are moved to the recycle bin and kept for a designated time before being permanently deleted. For work or school accounts, deleted files are purged after 93 days unless configured otherwise. For a demonstration about how the recycle bin works, see Restore deleted files or folders in OneDrive.
Auditing and reporting
OneDrive has detailed reporting and auditing capabilities for files it stores as well as for those files stored through other services that use OneDrive for storage, such as Microsoft SharePoint. In addition, you can audit individual file actions, including downloads, renames, and views.
The Microsoft 365 admin center handles reporting for cloud services, including OneDrive. You can view historical information like storage usage by user and for the organization, total file and active file counts, and account activity. The following image shows an example of a OneDrive report for file usage over the past 30 days in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
You can also consume this info in Power BI by using the Microsoft 365 usage analytics content pack. Using this content pack, you can visualize and analyze usage data by using prebuilt graphs and charts or by creating custom reports to gain insight into how specific regions or departments within your organization are using Microsoft 365. For more info about this content pack, see Microsoft 365 usage analytics.
Encryption of data in transit and at rest
OneDrive uses advanced data-encryption methods between your device and the data center, between servers in the data center, and at rest. At rest, OneDrive uses disk encryption through BitLocker Drive Encryption and file encryption to secure your data. Each file is encrypted with its own encryption key; anything larger than 64 KB is split into individual chunks, each of which has its own encryption key locked in a key store.
Each file chunk is then randomly distributed among Microsoft Azure Storage containers, and a construction map for the complete file is stored in a separate secure content database. For attackers to access the file, they would need all the file chunks, the keys, and the map—a highly improbable task. For more info about this process, see Data Encryption in OneDrive and SharePoint.
Prerequisites
System requirements. Even though you can upload, download, and interact with your OneDrive files from a web browser, the ideal OneDrive experience comes from the Windows and Mac sync apps and the iOS and Android mobile apps. With that in mind, OneDrive is available for most operating systems and browsers and requires minimal hardware. For a full list of system requirements for using OneDrive, see OneDrive system requirements.
License requirements. There are multiple methods by which you can acquire a license for OneDrive. However, a few OneDrive features are available only within certain licensing models. For info about the licensing requirements for OneDrive, its advanced features, and any special licensing required for them, see Office 365 plans.
OneDrive limitations
Because OneDrive provides access to files on many kinds of devices, it restricts the use of certain characters, file names, and folder names. In addition, certain features are available only in the Windows operating system. For a full list of these and other limitations of OneDrive, see Invalid file names and file types in OneDrive and SharePoint.
Install OneDrive
For some devices, this process may be as simple as installing an app. For others, you may need to delete older versions of OneDrive first. This section walks you through the manual installation and configuration of OneDrive on iOS and Android mobile devices, Windows devices, and computers running macOS.
Manually install and configure OneDrive on a mobile device
Installing the OneDrive app on a mobile device is simple: users can download the app from the app store on any Android, iOS, or Windows mobile device. To simplify the manual installation process even further, users can go to https://onedrive.live.com/about/download and enter the mobile phone number of their device. Microsoft will send a text message to the mobile device with a link to the app in the device's app store. Once installed, users can start the configuration process by opening the app and responding to the prompts.
Send your users the following links to set up OneDrive on their mobile devices:
Manually install and configure OneDrive on a Windows device
Manually installing OneDrive on a Windows device may or may not be necessary: many devices may already have it, either because the user installed Microsoft Office 2016 or simply because the device runs Windows 10, both of which include the OneDrive sync app by default. For devices running older versions of Windows or on which Office 2016 is not installed, you can download the new OneDrive sync app for Windows from https://onedrive.live.com/about/download.
You may be required to uninstall an old version of the OneDrive sync app before you can install the new one. If so, you will receive a notification stating that you must uninstall the previous version before you can proceed.
To manually configure OneDrive on a Windows device, see Sync files with the OneDrive sync app in Windows.
Manually install and configure OneDrive on a macOS device
For info about installing the OneDrive app on a computer running macOS or adding a work account to an existing installation, see Sync files with the OneDrive sync app for Mac.