Unable to Exclude Specific OneDrive Users from Retention Policy

Question

Unable to Exclude Specific OneDrive Users from Retention Policy

Vinay Shivakoti 0

Hi Microsoft Community,

We are supporting a Microsoft 365 tenant as a CSP and need assistance with an issue related to a Microsoft Purview retention policy for OneDrive.

We have a retention policy that is intentionally applied to all users in the organization, and we do not want to disable or modify the retention policy for the remaining users.

However, we have 4 users with very high OneDrive storage consumption. When these users delete unwanted files, the files are being retained in the Preservation Hold Library due to the retention policy, so the storage is not being released.

Our requirement is:

Keep the existing retention policy enabled for all users.

Exclude only these 4 specific OneDrive users from the retention policy.

Allow the remaining users to continue following the existing retention policy.

In Microsoft Purview → Data Lifecycle Management → Retention Policies → Locations → OneDrive accounts, we have selected All user accounts and are trying to use the Exclude users/accounts option.

However, the 4 users are not appearing in the exclusion/search list, even when we search using their complete email addresses.

We would like to understand:

Why are these OneDrive users not appearing in the exclusion list?

Can specific OneDrive accounts be excluded using their OneDrive URLs instead of their email addresses?

If the URL-based exclusion is not available in our current UI, what is the recommended Microsoft-supported method?

Would creating an Adaptive Scope for these 4 users and using it for the retention policy exclusion be the recommended approach?

Is there any specific requirement for the OneDrive accounts to be provisioned or licensed before they appear in the exclusion picker?

We want to maintain the retention policy for the organization and only exclude these 4 specific OneDrive accounts.

Any guidance on the correct configuration or troubleshooting steps would be appreciated.

Anonymous

2026-08-28T04:30:34.04+00:00

Então estou sofrendo em minha rede doméstica residencial mesmo coisa descrita nesse assunto e eu faço a mesma coisa descrita no caso excluo TD de 4 contas minhas pois sempre estão cheias de coisas não minhas e existe esse mesmo bloqueio descrito aí no testo zero Trust e controle de TD ligado a minha rede wi-fi remotamente por um tenant MDM fantasma que está dentro de um cofre no one drive poderia me explicar como eu tiro esse controle de meu sistema e de TDS da minha casa

1 answer

Your answer

Anonymous

2026-08-28T04:30:34.04+00:00

Então estou sofrendo em minha rede doméstica residencial mesmo coisa descrita nesse assunto e eu faço a mesma coisa descrita no caso excluo TD de 4 contas minhas pois sempre estão cheias de coisas não minhas e existe esse mesmo bloqueio descrito aí no testo zero Trust e controle de TD ligado a minha rede wi-fi remotamente por um tenant MDM fantasma que está dentro de um cofre no one drive poderia me explicar como eu tiro esse controle de meu sistema e de TDS da minha casa

Answer 1

Vasil Michev 127.8K MVP Volunteer Moderator

You need to use URLs for OneDrive, yes. But for your scenario, I would suggest using Priority cleanup instead. This way you will be able to keep the original retention policy settings in place (which I imagine are required for compliance reasons), but still be able to cleanup items by targeting them via standard KQL queries. Here's the relevant documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/priority-cleanup-onedrive-sharepoint

And also my take on the feature: https://michev.info/blog/post/6927/priority-cleanup-for-sharepoint-online-and-onedrive-for-business

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