Forum Discussion
Groups Lifecycle / Archiving / Moving
Hi,
I have been testing using Discovery Hold for groups no longer needed. This works fine when testing what data we can recover from a content search, ie conversations, one drive files and one note items. However once the group is deleted, how do we search for the data? I have tried email address for the conversations, but that doesn't work. One drive data can be retrieved by adding the url, but what happens if that url is reused as the group no longer exists?
I want the ability to put all groups on hold whilst we await a mature backup solution for groups.
Rgds
Lee
There's no soft-delete functionality available for Office 365 Groups today. When you delete a group, it is immediately removed from the system and cannot be retrieved. As you can imagine, this is not a great situation to be in and Microsoft has committed to providing soft-delete capabilities in the future. The situation is a little complicated because of the links that might exist for a group between Exchange, SharePoint, Planner, Dynamics CRM, and Power BI (not to mention AAD), so I suspect that this is why it is taking a while for the feature to emerge.
Hi Tony,
Thanks for the quick answer, your help is always appreciated. I was aware that groups do not have a soft deletion option, but was led to believe that you were able to put the group mailbox and one drive for business on Discovery Hold, so that you can run a content search to retrieve the items if the group is deleted? If that is not the case, then I will hold back on the roll out of groups in our tenant, until I have a solution to this pronlem.
Rgds
Lee
The scenario you advance is dependent on being able to recover items from the individual workload repositories and stitch them together to recover a group. That might indeed be possible, but I suspect not - at least not in a clean and seamless manner. For example, Exchange Online supports inactive mailboxes (deleted but still under hold), but group mailboxes don't normally show up when the recover/restore cmdlets are used, so I think you would have to perform a content search, export to PST, and import to a new group mailbox. But of course, you can't move data from a PST into a group mailbox to recreate conversations... See what I mean? And then what about associated plans, BI workspaces, and so on?
