When Someone Resigns, Who Owns the Files They Were Working On?

That question has a clean answer, and for a lot of businesses it is the wrong one.

If the work lived in that person’s OneDrive, it was attached to their account rather than to the company. Microsoft retains a departed user’s OneDrive for 30 days by default and grants their manager access during that window. Recoverable, technically. In practice it becomes a rushed archaeology project during someone’s notice period, run by people who do not know what was in there.

Files kept in SharePoint do not have this problem. They belong to the team, and staffing changes do not touch them. Most small businesses were never told there was a distinction, so files land wherever happened to be open.

What each one is for

OneDrive is personal space, the cloud equivalent of your own Documents folder: drafts and working files, private by default unless you deliberately share something. That is a legitimate and useful thing to have.

SharePoint is shared space, built for documents with collective ownership, the material your team or company works on together. Microsoft’s guidance reduces to a single test: working on it alone, save it to OneDrive; working on it with other people, save it where the team works.

Teams is not a third location

This is where most of the confusion originates. Teams presents a Files tab that looks like another storage destination, so people reasonably assume it is one.

It is not. Creating a team provisions a SharePoint site underneath it, and the Files tab is simply a view onto that site. A document uploaded to a channel has been written to SharePoint.

That is good news for anyone whose team already works in Teams, because your shared documents have been in the right place all along, owned collectively rather than by one person. You may already be doing this correctly without having decided to.

The rule

Your own draft, or something only you need? OneDrive.

Needed by the team, worked on by more than one person, or attached to a client or project? SharePoint, or the Teams channel covering that work, which is the same place.

And nothing that matters to the business should live exclusively on someone’s desktop or exclusively in their personal OneDrive.

Location changes how sharing behaves

This is the part people underestimate. Sharing out of your OneDrive issues an invitation into your personal area, usually through a link tied to your account. It works right up until it does not. Move the file or close the account and those links stop resolving, leaving whoever relied on them with nothing to click and no idea who to ask.

Shared libraries have no such dependency. Permission follows the team, so a colleague who needs the folder already has it and you simply tell them where to look. Nothing gets reissued when staffing changes.

While you are at it, send links rather than attaching copies. Everyone then opens the same current version, instead of five near-identical drafts circulating in five separate email threads.

What this actually buys you

Three things, and only one of them is about departures.

Continuity is the obvious one, covered above. Shared work stays with the team regardless of who comes or goes.

Findability is the one people feel daily. When team documents live in one shared library, people know where to look. Scattered across inboxes and personal drives, every search becomes a small excavation.

Recoverability matters on a bad day. Both services maintain version history and a recycle bin, so a document that gets overwritten, deleted, or encrypted by ransomware can be rolled back rather than reconstructed. That protection exists in both places, but it only helps if you know where the file was to begin with.

Getting there without a migration project

Move shared work into SharePoint or Teams and keep it out of individual accounts. Leave OneDrive for personal drafts, but never let it become the sole home of something the team depends on.

Get important files off local desktops. A document existing only on a laptop is neither backed up nor shared, and it goes wherever the laptop goes. Nobody has to change how they work, since the sync client keeps a local copy on the machine for offline use and pushes changes up automatically.

Agree on a convention and write it down. Something as plain as “client files live in that client’s folder” prevents a surprising amount of future confusion. And make sure someone knows how version history works before the day you need it.

Sorting out where things live

MVP Network Consulting helps businesses across Buffalo and Western New York organize Microsoft 365 file storage properly, including moving shared work out of personal accounts and setting up offboarding so nothing disappears with a departing employee. If you are not confident where your important files actually sit, we can map it. Reach out.