Ask five people in a Microsoft 365 business where a file should go and you may get five answers: “my OneDrive”, “the Teams channel”, “SharePoint”, “email it”, “the shared drive”. The confusion is understandable, because all three places can hold files and they look similar. Underneath, though, they do different jobs.
The short answer
- OneDrive is for your own work files. Drafts, personal notes, anything that is yours until it is ready to share.
- SharePoint is for the team’s and the company’s files. Anything other people need to find and keep working on, including after you leave.
- Teams is where you talk about files. Files in a Teams channel are actually stored in SharePoint behind the scenes.
A simple test: is this mine, or ours? If the business would need it after you left, it belongs in SharePoint.
OneDrive: personal work storage
Each user gets OneDrive storage tied to their own account. It is the right home for work in progress, and it syncs to their laptop so files are available offline.
The catch is ownership. When someone leaves and their account is deleted, their OneDrive is kept only for a retention period, 30 days by default, and then removed. Important files that only ever lived in one person’s OneDrive are at risk every time someone moves on.
SharePoint: where shared files belong
SharePoint holds files in sites, typically one per team, department or major client, and each site has document libraries. Access is granted to groups rather than to individuals, so a new starter who joins the Finance group sees the finance files automatically, and a leaver loses access in one step.
SharePoint also brings version history, metadata and search across everything you are allowed to see.
Teams: the conversation layer
Every team in Microsoft Teams has a SharePoint site behind it. Files posted in a standard channel are stored in that site’s document library, and the Files tab in the channel is simply a window onto it. Private and shared channels get their own separate sites.
Files shared in a one-to-one or group chat work differently. They are stored in the sender’s OneDrive and shared with the people in the chat. This is why “I sent it to you in Teams” files can vanish when the sender leaves.
Where things commonly go wrong
- A company file kept in someone’s OneDrive and shared with half the business
- A new Team for every small project, never archived, until nobody knows which one is current
- Important documents shared in chats rather than posted in a channel
- “Anyone with the link” sharing left switched on, so confidential files are reachable by anyone who is forwarded a link
That last one matters even more with AI tools. Microsoft 365 Copilot can surface anything a user has access to, so loose sharing turns into loose answers.
A structure that works for most small businesses
- One SharePoint site per department, such as Finance, Operations and Sales, connected to a Team of the same name
- A company-wide site for policies, templates and anything everyone needs
- Client or project sites only where they earn their keep, with a naming convention and an owner
- OneDrive for personal drafts only, with a habit of moving finished work to SharePoint
- External sharing set deliberately, with “anyone” links switched off unless there is a real need
Syncing without the chaos
The OneDrive app syncs both OneDrive and SharePoint libraries to File Explorer on Windows and Finder on a Mac, so staff can keep working in folders if they prefer. Sync the libraries people use daily rather than everything, which keeps laptops fast and reduces sync conflicts.
If your files are split between a file server, Dropbox, Google Drive and people’s OneDrives, our SharePoint migration and automation service brings them into one structure and sets up permissions by team.