Where Do Your Uploaded Documents Actually Go in Copilot Notebooks?

AI, Microsoft 365 4 Minutes
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One of the questions I get asked most often about Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks is deceptively simple: when I upload a document into a notebook, where does it actually live? It’s a fair question. If you’re an MSP, an administrator, or anyone responsible for governance, “it’s in the cloud somewhere” isn’t a good enough answer. You need to know exactly where that data sits, who can reach it, and what compliance controls apply. The answer turns out to be more interesting than most people expect, and it hinges on a relatively new piece of the Microsoft 365 storage platform called SharePoint Embedded.

The short answer: SharePoint Embedded

When you upload a document into a Copilot Notebook, it does not land in your OneDrive, and it doesn’t go into a regular SharePoint site or document library that you can browse to. Instead, it’s stored in SharePoint Embedded — specifically inside a user-owned container.

Here’s the part that surprises people. Copilot Notebooks, Copilot Pages, and Loop’s “My workspace” all share the same single user-owned container per user. You don’t get a separate container for each. The first time you need any one of those experiences, Microsoft provisions one container and reuses it for all three. Even the container’s name depends on which app you opened first: it’s called “Pages” if you visited the Microsoft 365 Copilot app first, or “My workspace” (localised to your Loop language) if you opened Loop first.

There’s a governance wrinkle worth committing to memory: in the SharePoint admin center, in PowerShell, and in Purview audit data, this container’s application name always shows as “Loop” — even when it only holds Copilot Notebooks. There is no separate “Copilot Notebooks” application filter. So if you go hunting for Copilot content in your audit logs and only search for “Copilot”, you’ll come up empty. Look for Loop.

So what is SharePoint Embedded?

SharePoint Embedded is an API-only file and document management system built on the same proven Microsoft 365 storage platform that powers SharePoint and OneDrive. The key word is API-only. Unlike a normal SharePoint site, there’s no friendly web UI you can navigate to. When an application uses SharePoint Embedded, it creates a separate storage partition inside your Microsoft 365 tenant, and the documents in that partition are only accessible through Microsoft Graph APIs — and only to the owning application.

Within that partition, the application stores content in entities called File Storage Containers. Think of a container as an API-only document library: it can hold any file type, supports folders, versioning, search, and co-authoring, but it’s dedicated to and reachable by just the one app that owns it. That isolation is the whole point. The files your Copilot Notebook depends on are walled off from other applications, yet they still benefit from the full richness of the Office stack — you can open an uploaded Word or Excel file in Office for the web straight from the experience.

This is the same architecture Microsoft uses under the hood for Loop and Designer. Copilot Notebooks is simply another first-party consumer of the platform.

The detail that matters most: your data stays in your tenant

This is the line I always emphasise with clients. The storage partition that SharePoint Embedded creates lives inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant. Your uploaded documents do not leave your tenant boundary. That means everything your existing Microsoft Purview controls already do, they continue to do here:

  • eDiscovery — content is discoverable

  • Auditing — actions are logged (remember: under the “Loop” application name)

  • Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
  • Retention policies and sensitivity labels
  • Conditional access

So while the storage mechanism is new, the compliance posture is reassuringly familiar. The data is yours, it’s in your tenant, and your governance tooling applies.

Quotas, limits, and a billing nuance

Here’s a distinction that trips people up. The general, developer-facing SharePoint Embedded model bills storage separately through an Azure pay-as-you-go subscription, and that storage does not count against your SharePoint quota. But Microsoft’s first-party use of it for Copilot Pages and Copilot Notebooks works differently. Copilot Pages and Copilot Notebooks content counts against your organisation’s existing SharePoint storage quota — there’s no separate Azure bill for it. The user-owned container has a hard ceiling of 25 TB, which can’t be raised or lowered.

Lifecycle: tied to the user, with sharp edges

The container’s lifecycle is bound to its owner. Content is private by default, much like OneDrive — there’s no forced sharing. When the owning user’s account is deleted, the container is scheduled for deletion and follows the same lifecycle as OneDrive, including a manual handoff step at departure and the option to permanently reassign the container to a new owner.

One critical warning for anyone planning their data protection strategy: there is no end-user recycle bin for Copilot Notebooks. If a notebook is deleted, neither the user nor an administrator can recover it. That’s a meaningful gap compared to the recycle-bin safety net we take for granted in SharePoint and OneDrive, and it’s worth flagging to end users before they start relying on Notebooks for anything important.

Why this matters

Copilot Notebooks feel lightweight and personal, but underneath sits real enterprise-grade storage that you already know how to govern — just wearing a new name. Knowing it’s SharePoint Embedded, that it surfaces as “Loop” in your admin tools, that it counts against SharePoint quota, and that it has no recycle bin turns “somewhere in the cloud” into something you can actually manage.

Copilot Notebooks storage & governance

SharePoint Embedded platform

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