Starting Next Year, OneDrive Service Will No Longer Be Available For Legacy Windows Users

Microsoft will be discontinuing OneDrive service on many PCs. (photo: microsoft)

JAKARTA - Microsoft will discontinue OneDrive service on many PCs running earlier versions of Windows starting early next year. These changes will impact Windows 7, 8, and 8.1.

Users with those operating systems will no longer be able to sync their content to the cloud starting March 1, 2022. OneDrive will also no longer receive updates if running on a system that doesn't have Windows 10 or Windows 11.

However, files can still be accessed from the OneDrive app, no matter what version of Windows you're using, but files just won't automatically upload to the cloud anymore.

To avoid any issues with OneDrive, Microsoft recommends that users install to a newer version of Windows before March of next year. For systems that can't run Windows 10 or Windows 11, Microsoft states that users can still back up their files by uploading them to the OneDrive web app.

Citing Slashgear, Monday, November 8, in addition to discontinuing updates and the ability to sync, OneDrive on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 will lose support on January 1. Microsoft explained, this change will allow companies to focus resources on new technologies and operating systems, and help keep users safe.

The company has recently also made Windows 11 available to users, although its release was controversial due to the TPM 2.0 minimum specification requirement. Microsoft addressed this by publishing a document that describes how to enable TPM 2.0 on PCs, although not all computers support it.

This OneDrive change will primarily impact users who are still using Windows on older hardware, if the model is more than five years old, there's a good chance it doesn't support the minimum Windows 11 requirements, though making the jump to Windows 10 remains an option.