Unable to login onedrive, which the account's admin/ IT support are no-longer able to contact

Hi joshua,

I understand how upsetting this must be, especially when those photos and videos contain important memories from your high school years. I hope the files are still available and can be recovered.

Because this is a OneDrive for Business/work account, it is managed as part of the organization’s Microsoft 365 environment rather than as a personal Microsoft account.

Microsoft’s own OneDrive guidance says that when a user cannot sign in to a work or school OneDrive account, they should contact their organization’s IT helpdesk, service desk, or administrator: Can't sign in to OneDrive | Microsoft Support

An authorized administrator can check the account and its associated OneDrive from the Microsoft 365 admin center. Microsoft also documents how an administrator can access a former user’s OneDrive data: Give another employee access to OneDrive and Outlook data.

Since you can no longer contact the previous IT support, the next step is to contact the current IT team or Microsoft 365 administrator of the organization that owns the account. They can check the current status of the account and OneDrive and determine what recovery options are available.

It would also be helpful to know approximately when you last had access to the account? This can matter because Microsoft has specific retention periods for a OneDrive after the user account is deleted. By default, the deleted user's OneDrive is retained for 30 days, although the organization can configure a longer retention period (up to 3650 days). After that retention period ends, the OneDrive remains in a deleted state for 93 days and can only be restored by a SharePoint Administrator.

These time limits apply to a deleted account; simply being unable to sign in does not by itself establish that the account or OneDrive has been deleted. The organization's administrator would need to check the actual account and OneDrive status.

So, please let me know when you last successfully accessed the account, if you know. In the meantime, contacting the organization's current IT/admin as soon as possible would be important because the recovery options depend on the account's current status and the tenant's configured retention settings.