In some cases you might need administrative access to a OneDrive for Business environment of a user. Yesterday, for example, I had to make a backup of a couple of OneDrive for Business instances. As you might know, OneDrive for Business is SharePoint Online under the hood. By default only the user has administrative rights of their OneDrive for Business, it is personal storage after all. If you open OneDrive for Business for another user you will only see files that are shared with you or Everyone as you can see below:
No Administrative Access OneDrive for Business
If you are familiar with SharePoint Online you might recognize some of these steps to get administrative access.
- Go to the Office 365 admin portal
- Open the SharePoint admin center
- On the left choose user profiles
- Manage User Profiles
- Find the user you would like to have access to
- Open the item menu of the user
- Manage site collection owners
- Add your administrator account
Manage User Profiles
Administrative Access OneDrive for Business Manage User Profiles Item Menu
OneDrive for Business Site Collection Admin
After executing the steps above, you will see all files and folders for the current user:
Administrative access OneDrive for Business
Another option to add your admin account to the OneDrive for Business site collection of the user is using Windows PowerShell. Make sure you are connected to SharePoint Online before executing the scripts below. You can do this easily with the scripts provided in another blogpost Easily manage multiple Office 365 tenants with Windows PowerShell.
https://gist.github.com/eugenedauphin/b6ac8e787a9deae57c93
