OneDrive Personal Vault is a special protected partition of OneDrive where users could lock their “most sensitive and important files.” They would access that area only after a second step of identity verification, ranging from a fingerprint or face scan to a self-made PIN, a one-time code texted to the user’s smartphone or the use of the Microsoft Authenticator mobile app. (The process is often labeled as two-factor security to differentiate it from the username/password that typically secures an account.)
The idea behind OneDrive Personal Vault, said Seth Patton, general manager for Microsoft 365, is to create a failsafe so that “in the event that someone gains access to your account or your device,” the files within the vault would remain sacrosanct.
Access to the vault will also be on a timer, Patton said, that locks the partition after a user-set period of inactivity. Files opened from the vault will also close when the timer expires.
As the feature’s name implied, the vault is only for OneDrive Personal, the consumer-grade storage service, not for the OneDrive for Business available to commercial customers. Although OneDrive Personal is a free service – albeit with a puny 5GB of storage – many come to it from the Office 365 subscription service. There, users are allotted 1TB of OneDrive space. (The single stand-alone plan is $2 per month for 50GB.)
OneDrive Personal Vault would, in that context, be a suitable location for crucial business documents and data, such as customer contact lists and accounting software data files. (source)
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