OneDrive Best Practices

What Is OneDrive?

OneDrive for Business is online storage that GVSU gives to all students, staff, and faculty through Microsoft. You can use it to save your files and access them from any device with an internet connection.

As a great place to keep your individual work/business related files, with OneDrive you can:

• Open your files from any computer, tablet, or phone
• Edit documents in your web browser using Microsoft Office apps
• Share files with others, even outside of GVSU

To log in, go to https://onedrive.live.com/login and use your GVSU email and password.

What Can You Store in OneDrive?

You can save most file types in OneDrive, like:

• Word documents
• PDFs
• Pictures and Videos
• Presentations

It also keeps old versions of your files in case you need to go back to a previous version.

What NOT to Store in OneDrive (Unless Specific Precautions are Taken):

• Personal or Highly Sensitive Information: Generally, avoid storing personal or highly sensitive data like passwords, or unencrypted lists of physical addresses, phone numbers, or email addresses in OneDrive.

• Regulated Data: While OneDrive can be used for regulated date such as HIPAA, FERPA, and GDPR-related information, especially for research purposes, it requires strict adherence to security protocols and careful handling. Ensure you're following all guidelines regarding access, sharing, and encryption. If you need to store and share such data, Microsoft Teams or an Office 365 Group might be a better option, as they offer more robust collaboration and access control features.

• Critical Collaborative Work: For documents that are actively co-authored or require long-term team access, Microsoft Teams or Office 365 Groups are preferred. When individuals leave GVSU, they lose access to their OneDrive account and its contents. In Teams or Groups, others retain access to important files, ensuring continuity.

How Do Files Get Backed Up?

If you’re using a GVSU-managed computer, OneDrive is already set to synchronize and backup certain folders automatically:

You can also:

• Move other files into the OneDrive folder to back them up
• Change which folders are backed up in the OneDrive app under Manage Backup

When Should You Use OneDrive?

Use OneDrive when you:

• Want easy access to your files from anywhere
• Need to work on documents with other people at the same time
• Are storing regular work or school files that don’t need to be saved forever

When NOT to Use OneDrive

Avoid using OneDrive for:

• Files that are owned or shared by a group—use a shared drive or request an Office 365 Group instead
• Personal or sensitive data—OneDrive retains deleted files for 30 days, providing a recovery window for accidentally removed data.
• Hosting large or high-performance files like virtual machines—OneDrive has limited input/output speed
• Programs and folders that use highly complex, nested and dynamically changing file structures or libraries that generate lots of small files, for example:
  • Video editing software projects (Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve)
  • Git repositories
  • Python virtual environments
  • macOS Photos app libraries

Restrictions and Limitations

OneDrive accounts include storage limits set by GVSU, and additional file-count and character/name limits set by Microsoft. A few are highlighted below. See Microsoft's Guide, Restrictions and limitations in OneDrive and SharePoint for more information and further troubleshooting.  

Storage Limits

Your storage amount depends on your GVSU Microsoft license, which is determined based on your Workday contract status.

• A5 License for Faculty/Staff (Full Time Faculty and Staff):
  • 1 TB
• A5 License for Students (Active/Enrolled Students)
  • 1 TB
• A1 License (Adjunct Faculty and Staff, all other employees):
  • 100 GB

See our guide Microsoft 365 A1 vs A5 Licensing for more information.

Total File Limits

When using the OneDrive website, you can only copy up to 2500 files at one time.

For optimum performance, Microsoft recommends syncing no more than a total of 300,000 items across your cloud storage. Performance issues can occur if you have more than 300,000 items, even if you are not syncing all items.

Invalid Characters and File Names

• Invalid Characters: " * : < > ? / \ |
• Leading and trailing spaces in file or folder names also aren't allowed.
• The entire file path (the name of the file, and the name of the folders it lives in) cannot exceed 400 characters

Eligibility

All current GVSU students, staff, and faculty are eligible to use OneDrive for Business.