Forum Discussion
cfiessinger
Microsoft
MicrosoftNew feature: Recover deleted Office 365 Group via PowerShell
If you've deleted an Office 365 group, it's now retained by default for a period of 30 days. Within that period, you can now restore the group and its associated apps and data via a new PowerShell cmdlet. For additional information please go to https://aka.ms/groupssoftdelete.
Hey Chris,
We have a unique scenario that I'd like to get some feedback for..
-Office 365 group gets deleted
-30 days pass
- Retention policy is in place ( which includes groups)
-what happens to the group? is it still recoverable or searchable in the compliance portal?
Is it possible to restore a group if the domain name of the group has been removed from the tenant since deletion of the group?
installed AzureADPreview 2.0.0.127 and Windows management Framework 5.0 on windows 7 64bit. But when I run Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup, I get "The term 'Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Do I need to install anything else in order to run this PowerShell?
Thanks.
Akiko
Hi Chris,
Once the 30 days is over, I understand that the group will be purged.
Is it still possible to submit a help ticket to Microsoft within 14 days after 30 days to have it recovered?
Kind Regards
Vincent Ha
- My test team doesnt appear to have restored. For this to work and when creating a team is there a pre-requisite of a group for that team already existing? Therefore, (1) create group first and then (2) create team and link it to that group - then when you do the restore it restores the team? Seems long-winded but if that's the solution then that's OK.
- cfiessingerChris it should have been restored, please contact support to get this investigated further.
I tested the restore process and found that everything came back pretty quickly. I could access the restored Group in Outlook on the Web almost immediately. The SharePoint Team Site took a little longer to restore, maybe 5-10 minutes later.
The only service that hasn't restored yet is Teams. Do we have to wait even longer for Teams? I re-connected Teams to the Group to see if the content was there, it was not. Should the Team automatically reconnect to the Group after restore? Will it still restore the content even after I've re-connected Teams to the Group?
Teams will also be restored, This will take about the same amount of time as the SharePoint Library
I've tested this and yes the group and files have restored but not the team I had setup in teams
the size of the group was tiny, probably only 2mb worth of files.
Does it just generally take quite a while for a teams team recreate itself?
This is Great News! well done
I've been testing with this (long awaited) feature and when I restore a deleted group, it doesn't re-appear in my Outlook 2016 client nor in the web client
When I search the group in the web client, I'm able to find and access it but it still won't show up in my list of groups...
It has been approx 24 hours since I restored the group btw.
Am I missing something?
Ronald Knaap during my testing I noticed delays as well. In my case the user got a "Something has changed etc etc and you must restart Outlook" popup. After restarting Outlook the Groups appeared.
I guess it makes sense, considering the model Groups use to "signal" the different workloads. It's a very good idea to note this in the documentation, maybe with somewhat bigger letters :)
cfiessinger I've been testing this and there seems to be some inconsistency, or perhaps just delays in how the restoration is processed in the back end.
The issues I'm noticing are:- The Group owner/admin who deletes the Group is not included as a member when the Group is restored. In one case I had to go through the process of requesting to join, then approving my own request, to get back into the Group.
- Some public Teams that have been restored are unable to be joined by others afterwards.
It's inconsistent though. Two Teams (one private, one public, both with an admin and a single non-admin member) were deleted and restored without issue. Meanwhile others that I restored over an hour ago are still unable to be joined.
I haven't noticed any issues within Outlook or Planner though (other than the cases where the admin wasn't restored), this is all Teams issues.
Edit: eventually it seems they've come good again. Is everything I saw there just the expected/possible delay of up to 24 hours for the full restoration process to complete?
- Wow Paul, thanks for sharing your tests...it seems the feature might have some problems and I also will try to find some time to test it and confirm your results
jcgonzalezmartin see my edited post above. Might not be anything more than just a delay with some of the apps being fully restored. Bit of a rough experience overall.
Awesome news, glad you finally relased this feature! Some more information on what happens when you soft-delete a group might be useful, for example can the group still receive mail, what happens if some group content is on hold (i.e. how it is handled in respect to all workloads; what happens if you try to hard-delete), etc.
