OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams: where should your files actually live?

The three places, one line each

Microsoft 365 hands you three homes for files and almost no guidance on which is which. In everyday terms:

• OneDrive is your personal drawer. Roughly 1 TB of space, and what you keep there is yours.
• SharePoint is the company's shared filing cabinet. The business owns what goes in it, rather than any one person.
• Teams is the workspace that sits on top of SharePoint. Share a file in a channel and it is really being stored in SharePoint underneath.

Once that lands, most "where does this go" decisions make themselves.

The principle underneath the product names

The three-way split is not a Microsoft invention, and it is easier to remember if you know where it comes from. Records and information management practice - the discipline AIIM has been codifying for decades - separates content by ownership and lifecycle rather than by tool^[1]:

1. 1Personal working content. Drafts, notes, half-finished analysis. Owned by an individual, short-lived, no obligation to keep it. In Microsoft's world: OneDrive.
2. 2Departmental or project collaboration. Content that a group works on together and that outlives any one member. Owned by the team, retained for the life of the project. In Microsoft's world: a SharePoint site, usually surfaced through a Teams channel.
3. 3Corporate records and published content. Contracts, policies, signed documents, the master client list. Owned by the organisation, governed by a retention schedule, often with a legal minimum. In Microsoft's world: a SharePoint site with a retention policy applied.

If you decide where a file goes by asking "who owns this and how long must it survive?" instead of "which app is open?", you get the same answer every time - and the answer stays right when Microsoft renames the products again.

Where each kind of file belongs

Before the split, it helps to know what sits underneath: a Teams channel's Files tab is a connected SharePoint site, and chat files live in the sender's OneDrive^[2].

A simple test: if losing a file the day someone leaves would hurt the business, it belongs in SharePoint, not a personal OneDrive.

Why this matters more than it sounds

A file in someone's OneDrive is tied to their account. For a rough draft, that is fine. For a signed contract or the master client list, it is a genuine risk, because the file leaves with the person the moment they do.

The leaver trap

This is the one we see catch people out. Someone resigns, the account gets removed or unlicensed to save the fee, and a few weeks later a client asks for a document that only ever sat in that person's OneDrive. From the point the account is gone, those files are recoverable for about 30 days, and then not at all.

Files in SharePoint dodge this entirely. The business owns them, so a resignation never walks out with company documents. It is also the reason a proper Microsoft 365 backup earns its keep, which we cover on its own.

How files behave inside Teams

Teams trips people up because it does not really store files. It leans on other places to do that:

• Files shared in a channel land in that team's SharePoint library.
• Files shared in a private chat land in the sender's OneDrive.
• Meeting recordings land in the channel, in SharePoint.

So the habit worth building is a simple one: share work in a channel rather than a chat, and it ends up in the company cabinet instead of a personal drawer.

A setup that works for a team of ten

You do not need an elaborate structure. For most small teams, four moves cover it:

1. 1One SharePoint site per department or main function.
2. 2OneDrive kept for personal drafts only.
3. 3The team sharing in channels rather than as email attachments.
4. 4Access set to least privilege, and looked over once a quarter.

Set up in an afternoon, it puts an end to the weekly hunt for a file nobody can find.