Are Loop Files Searchable or Not?

Another seeming misconception I've been seeing.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Last week, I wrote about a common misconception I heard at the M365 Community conference: that only Copilot interactions by licensed users of Copilot for M365 were stored inside the environment and available for eDiscovery.

I want to investigate Loop this week because I’ve heard contradictory information regarding eDiscovery. Also, I will be part of a session at ILTACON in August covering collaboration with Loop, so I’d better keep up with it!

Most importantly, I have heard these files referred to as non-searchable, which seemed at odds with previous testing I had completed. When you hear those kinds of comments, the first thing to do is go back and re-test because we all know things change, and what was true may not be true anymore. This is especially true when an M365 like Loop has undergone this much development in recent months.

I re-tested and found that they are searchable, but collecting them does require some special considerations.

Most notably, they weren’t indexed immediately. I feared that Microsoft had made a change that made the text in Loop files unsearchable, but that fear was laid to rest about 45 minutes to an hour after creating them.

I wonder if that is why people think they aren’t searchable. They didn’t wait long enough, or they could be having difficulty locating them.

Let’s get into the details.