Files restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams
Published Apr 22 2019 12:31 PM 145K Views
Microsoft

Data loss is non-negotiable. Period. As innovation in the cloud drives business value, it delivers new capabilities to the IT professionals and site admins who work tirelessly to support, configure, administer, and secure their organizations’ and teams’ content. And it is important that you are empowered to recover from accidental deletions or version issues at the speed business productivity requires.

 

Today we begin to roll out Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams – a new Microsoft 365 feature. This is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap: ID 33714 and originally announced at Ignite 2018.

 

If something went wrong, you can restore a SharePoint document library (the same storage mechanism behind the Files tab in Microsoft Teams) to a previous time. Select a date preset or use the slider to find a date within unusual activity in the chart. Then select the changes that you want to undo.If something went wrong, you can restore a SharePoint document library (the same storage mechanism behind the Files tab in Microsoft Teams) to a previous time. Select a date preset or use the slider to find a date within unusual activity in the chart. Then select the changes that you want to undo.

We've built Microsoft 365 with global scale, exceptional reliability, and support for compliance across industries and geographies on top of intelligent security that keeps your service and content protected and private, we give you granular and dynamic controls so that you can manage access, distribution and recovery of your organization's sensitive content and information.

 

Let’s dive into the details…

 

Restore your files with confidence from SharePoint and Microsoft Teams

Files restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams is a complete self-service recovery solution that allows administrators and site owners to restore files from any point in time during the last 30 days. Site owners will see a new "Restore this library" option within the library settings panel. This can be used as a self-service to restore the files and folders in the library you suspect have been compromised by end-user deletion, file corruption, or malware infection – to any point in the past 30 days.

 

Simply go to the gear icon in the upper right > select Restore this library > select a date range, select your files > click Restore.

 

Go to Site Settings and select "Restore this library" to start the process of recovering a file or set of files based on a date prior to the issue.Go to Site Settings and select "Restore this library" to start the process of recovering a file or set of files based on a date prior to the issue.

If lots of your SharePoint or Teams files get deleted, overwritten, corrupted, or infected by malware, you can restore your entire document library to a previous time. Files Restore helps Office 365 subscribers undo all the actions that occurred on both files and folders within the last 30 days.

 

Files Restore is now available for SharePoint document libraries, protecting your shared files in SharePoint, Teams, Outlook groups, and Yammer groups connected to Office 365 groups and uses the same recovery capabilities that protect your individual files in OneDrive for Business.

 

Note to IT: files across the SharePoint and Teams user interfaces are stored in the same storage container (SharePoint document libraries), thus offer the same experience and capabilities as a single-source offering throughout Microsoft 365.

 

What else do I need to know?

Now you can rewind changes using activity data to find the exact moment to revert to.

 

We'll be gradually rolling this out to Targeted Release organizations in April 2019, and the roll out will be completed worldwide by the end of May 2019.

 

Learn more how to restore your SharePoint and Teams files. And the related how to restore your OneDrive.

 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: When is this all being released in Office 365?

A: Files restore for SharePoint has begun Targeted Release to customers in Office 365. We plan to extend release to all full Targeted Release customers by the end of April 2019. We then plan to fully release to all full production Office 365 customers by the end of May 2019.

38 Comments

Nice, great feature! Have been wondering where this was on the roadmap, good to see it not forgotten! 

Silver Contributor

I wonder why it took longer to implement. OneDrive is also using SPO under the hood and had this feature for a long time. Anyway, great to have this through out all services now.

Brass Contributor

Like it, this will help

Copper Contributor

While this is a great feature I am really waiting for SHARES to work more like Dropbox and available on my machine when I’m offline and traveling. 

Copper Contributor

Finally! Great news.

Copper Contributor

An amazing and expected feature!

Copper Contributor

From the sounds of this it is the whole document library is that correct? If you restore it overwrites all documents to that point? What if you have some files in the library which you want to keep I'm guessing you still need to use the individual document restore option?

Silver Contributor

Yes, this File restore option is designed for disaster recovery. Well, you can copy out a few good files before running a restore and then copy them back.

Brass Contributor

@DeletedYou could use this function to restore the whole document library and then for the files that you would like to keep revert them to the version before the restore. 

Copper Contributor

@Ruth de Groot  surely that wouldn't work because if you revert the document library I'm guessing this reverts all documents to the previous versions so the new content wouldn't exist. It really depends how MS are doing the restore. They could simply being restoring the whole document library over the top of the existing one in which case I would expect any new content would be lost. Alternatively if they are getting the content of the old files and adding them as new versions on documents then you might be able to restore.

 

Brass Contributor

@DeletedI expected that they use the same method as with onedrive and that uses previous versions. I haven't tested this functionality yet.

 

Brass Contributor

Great news. However, as the title does not clearly state, users or administrators won’t be able to restore just a single file or a single folder. The granularity is the Document Library. So restoring a file as it was at a specific date may also restore other files. Based on whatever point in time you select it will bring back all changes, renames, deletions, corruptions, etc. OneDrive file restore uses the same mechanism. 
Restoring just a few files or a single file would be better achieved using the site’s recycle bin or the file versioning feature.

Brass Contributor

Nice feature, now Microsoft needs to put List Restore on the roadmap so that we can start looking forward to that.

Copper Contributor

Great feature, but I have 2 questions :
1- How can I restore single file or folder ? as the current feature restores only the whole document library .
2- How can I restore a document library that was deleted by mistake ? as the current link that allows me to restore the document library exists inside the document library and in this scenario the document library was deleted so the link is deleted as well !  >> the old way ? i.e./ restore from recycle bin ? 

Silver Contributor

Yes, from recycle bin, using version history. This new feature is designed for disaster recovery when a lot of files are corrupted by malware, accidentally overwritten or damaged in other ways, so you can restore whole library to a set point in time with one click.

Copper Contributor

What about checked out files? will they be overwritten also?

Copper Contributor

Excellent feature. Well done!

Iron Contributor

Is this available for SharePoint Sites too or just document library level restore? I tried installing a spfx extension yesterday and it broke list menu for few lists. In such scenarios i would prefer to roll back entire site.

@Naveen Karla this is only for documents, you need to remove your extension from admin center / Apps in SharePoint Admin and it will get rid of the extension and the issue should go away. 

Iron Contributor

@Chris Webb Thanks Chris for the info this is helpful this extension broke when i specified site url in serve.json and did a gulp serve. It broke list menu on all lists and i don't find it in app catalog either. Maybe i'll open an issue on sp-dev-docs. Again thanks for the information through.

Iron Contributor

Is this feature really just available for group-connected SharePoint sites and only for users in the owner group?

 

  • I find no restore option in Communication Sites.
  • For (group-connected) team sites, users with "Full Permissions" have also no option to use this feature.
Copper Contributor

Hello @Mark Kashman,

 

Will the option "Restore Document library" only restore the files or it will restore if the column format has also changed?
For example, I modified one column name from Single line of text to number column type one week ago and after that the column values are get corrupted. Now, If I want that those changes recovered or restored. Will it restore the column types?

 

Regards,

Tamil

Silver Contributor

No. This is designed for document libraries, which means to restore files in the library, not for restoring lists or fields.

Copper Contributor

Since this restore functionality is based on recycle bin and version history, can one be sure that a malware cannot affect the recycle bin?

 

It would take some seriously crafted malware to do that since it would have to somehow get access to 365 via the computer and then know the site etc. to login as and access the version history, assuming the user was site collection admin etc. 

 

Pretty much all malware is going to be file system based and affect the files on machines. Which in turn syncs via OneDrive back into SharePoint. Currently that's really the only risk, so any kind of recycle bin / version history manipulation is unlikely, but when it comes to computers and software if someone has enough time and resources could eventually figure something out, but it's just as likely as some malware attacking a tape backup or backup solution etc. directly which is the same risk, but highly unlikely to happen. 

Copper Contributor

We used a third party tool to migrate documents into sharepoint online. The default option was copy and replace. Few documents in the library were replaced and no new version was added and the replaced documents were not found in recycle bin as well. Will I be able to use this functionality to restore back the replaced documents.

 

Regards

Subhash

Brass Contributor

@Subhash89 This function would bring you back to a state before you migrated the documents and doesn't seem to be a resolution for you because you also lose all the migrated documents. Have you checked the previous versions of a file that was replaced, if a previous version is available then you can restore it like that.

Copper Contributor

@Ruth de Groot Thanks for the info. Unfortunately the documents had only one version(1.0) before the migration. And after migration also the replaced documents had the same verison(1.0). No new versions were added. The documents were just replaced without any version change.

Copper Contributor

This will be very helpful - nice feature!

Brass Contributor

Absolutely fantastic feature thank you.  One of the most useful features I have seen roll out in awhile.

Copper Contributor

nice to have, but what about the 31st day? bad luck?

Silver Contributor

Same as with 32 day and so on. Backups take space. And the more older backup is the less valuable it is. They had to draw the line somewhere. 30 days is plenty to notice accidental deletion or ransomware encryption.

Copper Contributor

@wroot  that might be your experience but I have seen it more than once where they come back after 3+ months. 

Silver Contributor

They who? Ransomers? So, users haven't noticed their files are unreadable for 3 months?

Copper Contributor

Hello there @Mark Kashman, has this been rolled out to all tenancies yet? I am not seeing it on our Sites (yes I am owner). Thanks 

@Lloyd Bowen not sure if it's standard release, but if you are first release it should be by now. Make sure you are going / navigating to a document library first. Once there then click settings cog in top right and you should see it in that menu. 

Copper Contributor
Thanks Chris. We are "Targeted release for selected users" -- not sure what that resolves to for tenant features. I did open the library first but the restore function was not there. I restored manually through recycle bin, which I guess is pretty much the same thing
Silver Contributor

No, this feature is meant to restore whole libraries after some corruption, malicious actions, malware encryption.

Version history
Last update:
‎Apr 22 2019 12:31 PM
Updated by: