Microsoft’s OneDrive ‘Personal Vault’ Rolls Out Globally

Keeping your sensitive data in the cloud is often a risky proposition, but Microsoft is trying to give users a safe place to stash things online. After testing the feature in a handful of countries, the OneDrive Personal Vault is live for everyone. Personal Vault uses robust encryption and additional access controls ensure that you’ll probably be the only person peeking at that data. 

Personal Vault is part of the existing OneDrive service, so you won’t need to set up a new account or download new apps. Just make sure you’re all up-to-date, and look for the new Personal Vault section of the app. The app keeps unauthorized people from checking out your secure files by requiring a secure authentication method — a PIN, fingerprint, face ID, or single-use code sent to a verified email. The vault also closes and locks itself after a period of inactivity. 

Microsoft suggests people might want to keep photos of important documents and IDs like passports. Of course, you don’t want something like that floating around in your camera roll. That’s why the Personal Vault includes an option to capture photos directly in the app, bypassing less secure areas of your phone. To prevent accidentally leaking your own data, Personal Vault files cannot be shared via the app. If you want to share something in the vault, you’ll have to move it to another folder first. 

The Personal Vault is available on both Android and iOS.

When something is in the Personal Vault, Microsoft protects it with BitLocker encryption. Files are encrypted at rest and during transfers. So, they’re only decrypted when you verify your identity to view them. Like other OneDrive files and folder, the files in the Personal Vault can sync to your connected desktop computers. However, the files remain in a BitLocker encrypted area of your hard drive. 

The feature is still rolling out to devices, but you’ll know you’ve got it when the safe icon appears in the folder list. Just tap on that, and you can start adding files. Unfortunately, Microsoft has tied Personal Vault into the pricing scheme for OneDrive. Users on the free tier have 100GB of space, but the vault can only host three files. Anyone with a paid Office 365 account has 1TB of space, and there’s no separate limit on Secure Vault files.

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