Where Should I Save My Files? OneDrive vs. Teams

Audience: Franklin University faculty and staff.  
Disclaimer: The results and functionality of the following article only apply to the audience listed above.

There are several options for online file storage at the University through our Office 365 services. You can save and back up files to your OneDrive account, which is linked to your University email address. You can also upload files to SharePoint team libraries, which can be accessed through Microsoft Teams or through the underlying team SharePoint site in your web browser.

A few important questions to ask when deciding where to upload files are:

• "Who needs to access this file?"
• "Is this official University documentation or is it my work-in-progress?"
• "Will this document be important to my department for historical/documentation purposes?"

One way to look at your personal OneDrive storage is that it’s a holding place for things that are currently in progress and not ready to be shared with the larger team, or your own personal notes and to-do items. If there is anything that would be critical to the University should you depart, those documents should reside in a Team library rather than your personal OneDrive library. It is true that you can share OneDrive files with other people, but this should only be used in cases where you are collaborating with one or two other people on a short-term task, and a final output of that task might be stored within a Team.

OneDrive storage is directly tied to an individual user's account. If that account is removed, so are the files. A Team document library is accessible to all members of the Team, and the existence of the files is not dependent on the existence of a particular user. 

NOTE: If an employee leaves the University, their OneDrive files are technically still available for 90 days. During that 90-day period, the employee’s supervisor may request access to the employee’s OneDrive files and have the opportunity to copy them somewhere else before they are removed. However, this should not be relied upon as a way to ensure that your department has access to important files. They should be saved in the relevant Team.

Wish to log a request with the Help Desk? Use your Franklin University username and password to login: Log A Request