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.

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?

Ronald Knaap wrote: Which is our slogan with Office 365 the last few months.. If something doesn't work..."It's a matter of time!" :) Many Office 365 problems are solved by just waiting longer.

you can now write a script that notifies you on a regular basis for instance using this new cmdlet: Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup | Sort-Object DisplayName| Format-Table Id, DisplayName, Description, Visibility

The restore is completed so it took arround 10 min to restore the Conversations and 6 hours to restore +/-350 GB of data in SharePoint. Anyways the restore works just perfect :) Thanks for making this feature available!

woot! Is there a way for admins to know if/when an Office 365 Group is deleted?

New feature: Recover deleted Office 365 Group via PowerShell

50 Replies

Drew Madelung
MVP
Mar 28, 2017
Great news! Is it planned to know how long Groups have left in the recoverable state be available via these cmdlets?
- cfiessinger
  Microsoft
  Mar 28, 2017
  From the documentation:
  
  "You can also permanently delete a soft-deleted group if you can't wait the 30 days for the retention period to expire for the content to be permanently deleted."
  - Paul Miller
    Copper Contributor
    Jan 23, 2018
    What's the procedure for permanent deletion? the -permanent switch is designated for internal Microsoft Use only according to the documentation for the Remove-UnifiedGroup command. And attempting to use it in Azure PowerShell results in the following error:
    
    A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'Permanent'.
    + CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (:) [Remove-UnifiedGroup], ParameterBindingException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NamedParameterNotFound,Remove-UnifiedGroup
    + PSComputerName : ps.outlook.com
John Graham
Brass Contributor
Mar 28, 2017
Excellent! ty.
Jessie_Hernandez
Brass Contributor
Mar 28, 2017
Thank you!!!!! When restoring a group will any data (Sharepoint Document Libraries) associated with the group be restored as well?
- cfiessinger
  Microsoft
  Mar 28, 2017
  it does as mentioned in the document referred above:
  "Group content that can be restored includes: (...) SharePoint Online team site and files"
Brent Ellis
Silver Contributor
Mar 28, 2017
woot!

Is there a way for admins to know if/when an Office 365 Group is deleted?
- Sara Cortez
  Microsoft
  Sep 13, 2017
  I found this very useful to check all groups https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Office-365-Groups-Report-7e3e161b
- Paul Cunningham
  Steel Contributor
  Mar 28, 2017
  Brent Cordis try this script
  
  https://practical365.com/collaboration/groups/powershell-script-generate-reports-groups-office-365/
  
  We'll be updating it to flag whether deleted groups are still recoverable as well, now that the new feature is available.
  
  cc cfiessinger
- Paul van Lingen
  Tin Contributor
  Mar 28, 2017
  Finally, thanks for the update!
  - jcgonzalezmartin
    MVP
    Mar 28, 2017
    Awesome stuff!!!

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New feature: Recover deleted Office 365 Group via PowerShell