Someone leaves. Their manager needs their emails, the finance team wants a spreadsheet nobody else has a copy of, and somebody has already asked whether the licence can be cancelled to save money. The order in which you do these things matters more than people expect.
The short version
- Delete the account and you have 30 days to restore it, with everything intact. After that it is gone.
- Remove the licence without deleting the account and the mailbox data is kept for 30 days before it is permanently removed.
- When an account is deleted, the OneDrive is retained for 30 days by default — an administrator can extend this — and then goes to the recycle bin for 93 days.
- Accounts left unlicensed are archived automatically after 93 days.
The trap is simple: the money saved by cancelling a licence immediately is small, and the cost of discovering three months later that a contract, a client history or a set of accounts went with it is not.
What to do, in order
- Block the account straight away. This stops access immediately without touching any data, and it is the security step that actually matters on the day.
- Convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox, or forward it to their manager, so customers emailing the old address still reach someone.
- Move the OneDrive contents somewhere the team can reach — a SharePoint site, not another individual's OneDrive, or you are back in the same position when that person leaves.
- Only then remove the licence.
Real-world tip: A mailbox converted to a shared mailbox does not need a licence if it stays under 50GB. That is the route most small businesses want: the history is kept, the address still works, and it costs nothing.
Real-world tip: Ask the question before somebody resigns, not after. A five-minute leavers process agreed in advance — who gets the email, where the files go, who signs it off — removes the panic entirely.
The bigger point
All of the timings above are Microsoft's defaults, and every one of them is a deadline rather than a safety net. Microsoft protects its platform; it does not keep a copy of your data for your convenience. Independent backup of Microsoft 365 — email, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams — costs a few pounds per user per month and means none of these windows matter. We think it is the single best-value thing a small business can add to its Microsoft 365 subscription.