OneDrive or SharePoint: where should this file go?

OneDrive: your own work files

OneDrive is your personal space for work: drafts, notes, files you are working on that nobody else needs yet. You can share individual files from it, but it belongs to you.

When someone leaves the company and their account is removed, their OneDrive is deleted after a set period unless someone moves the files first. Important shared files kept in one person’s OneDrive are at risk.

SharePoint and Teams: files the team owns

SharePoint holds files for a team, department or the whole company. Every team in Teams has a SharePoint site behind it: the Files tab in a channel is SharePoint.

Files there belong to the team. People come and go and the files stay. Access is managed by membership: add someone to the team and they can see the files.

A simple rule

• Only you need it, or it is not ready yet: OneDrive.
• The team needs it, or the business would need it if you left: SharePoint or Teams.

Avoid two habits

• Sharing whole folders from OneDrive as the team’s main storage. Move them into SharePoint instead.
• Emailing attachments back and forth. Share a link to the file so everyone works on one copy.