Forum Discussion
Microsoft Forms Data Deletion
gregmck once a response is deleted my understanding is that there is no way to retrieve it from anywhere; there is certainly no server to which anyone has access that will enable you to retrieve it.
If you wish to have form responses held under a retention policy then you will need to - as we do - always save Forms responses to a SharePoint list via a flow in Power Automate.
Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User
RobElliott - thank you very much for the response, which is sincerely appreciated.
The issue isn't so much about being able to retrieve any deleted response. That's the last thing we want! Our deletion of the response, from the Form and from the Workbook, is the step(s) we take, to try to ensure that the response cannot be retrieved at our end.
What I'm trying to ascertain, though, is if the response is deleted period; that is, once we have deleted it at our end, it becomes non-retrievable from anywhere, by anyone, for any reason - whether it is wiped; or whether the submitted data will still be preserved on a server, someplace, for some period of time, when everyone thinks it has - in effect, but perhaps not in actuality - been deleted...?
We're not so much concerned about our handling of the data - we gather, we process, we delete; just about whether the data could (and fingers crossed it would never happen!) - but still, whether the data could be accessed by someone else, even on a server "to which [no-one] has access", when we believed it had been deleted and should therefore no longer exist.
Thank you again for your response.