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Dean_Gross's avatar
Dean_Gross
Silver Contributor
Feb 16, 2018

Finding files in SPO recycle bin

what is the trick for finding specific files in SPO recycle bin? we can only sort by title and date deleted, there is no filtering and when there are thousands of files, it is an endless scroll which is unusable.

  • It would be really nice if it had a search, wouldn't it. What I've been doing is scrolling down to the bottom and doing a control + f to search text in the path or filename on the page. 😕
    • DanTopline's avatar
      DanTopline
      Copper Contributor

      christinepayton 

       

      Lucky you, I have probably gigabytes of data to browse through. Scrolling to the bottom would take me at least half a day...

  • David_Calderon's avatar
    David_Calderon
    Copper Contributor
    Come on Microsoft, listen to the community, 5 years and no improvement has been done on SharePoint Recycle bin... this is the only restore mechanism in SharePoint so far for deleted files and finding files to restore is almost impossible....
  • DanTopline's avatar
    DanTopline
    Copper Contributor
    5 years later and I still can't search in recycle bin. C'mon Microsoft!
  • LTarbutton's avatar
    LTarbutton
    Copper Contributor

    Dean_Gross you wrote this in 2018 and as a new sharepoint user I am shocked that the recycle bin remains just as unusable and unsearchable as before...

  • Innovation's avatar
    Innovation
    Brass Contributor

    Agreed this functionality needs to be accessible to Site Collection Admins. Please add to top priority

  • JSlei's avatar
    JSlei
    Brass Contributor

    Dean_Gross You can use PowerShell to export the recycle bin items to a csv file and use excel to filter on dates, users, etc.

    All you need to do is install the SharePoint PNP Powershell module and run the following:

     

    Connect-PnPOnline -Url https://<sitecollectionurl/
    Get-PnPRecycleBinItem -firstStage | export-csv <filepath>

  • Eline Kurvink's avatar
    Eline Kurvink
    Copper Contributor

    Did someone find out how you can select files from the recycle bin to remove (filter on user, sort on file size etc.) Dean_Gross 

  • Cyrille Belfort's avatar
    Cyrille Belfort
    Copper Contributor

    I've found this UNTESTED and (relativelly) old powershell script search option, that we'll explore in our team. http://www.sharepointdiary.com/2016/07/sharepoint-online-search-recycle-bin-using-powershell.html

    As recycleBin is now the only Back Up management mechanism in SPO, it is almost indispensable to make it more efficient. At the moment it works that's it. Good search / filtering mechanism would make it great.

    We had an incident where a user misunderstanding onedrive synchronisation just deleted ~7000 files from his synced folders (Sharepoint). Was hell to find all these mistakenly deleted files (as other files were also rightfully deletes in the middle).

     

  • Brian Yurick's avatar
    Brian Yurick
    Copper Contributor
    I'm bumping up this old thread because I have the same question and have gotten no where in my research. Is there really no way to search the recycle bin?

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