Forum Discussion
Groups Lifecycle / Archiving / Moving
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?