Recreating channel with same name after deleting it

[Kristian Buchholtz]

Hello all,

I wanted to clean a channel of a team and deleted that channel. Now I am not able to recreate a channel with the same same. It always tell me, that a channel with this name already exists. What can I do?

Regards, Kristian

[#2]

You will need to rename or remove the folder in the document library in SharePoint that matching your channel name

[#3]

Thank you for your very quick reply. I tried that too, but it doesn't work. I will try this again.

[#4]

It doesn't work. I have deleted the folder, the message stays the same.

[#5]

I can confirm that I'm seeing this behavior...it seems that even deleting the channel and the folder for the channel is not enough for Teams to consider the channel for the Team was deleted

[#6]

Can you check other libraries.

Are you in an educational tenant? I think the notebooks also have the folder structure in them.

[#7]

---

@Pieter Veenstra wrote:
Can you check other libraries.

Are you in an educational tenant? I think the notebooks also have the folder structure in them.

---

I have already checked other libraries and the notebook as well. There are no folders or notebooks left with that name. I am in a standard O365 business tenant.

[#8]

Can you post the Microsoft teams logs?

[#9]

https://veenstra.me.uk/2017/08/03/microsoft-teams-how-to-troubleshoot-microsoft-teams/

[#10]

Here it is. But I think there aren't any useful information in the log file. The channel creation action is not listed.

[#11]

I think, I uploaded the wrong logs. Here are the new ones.

[#12]

2017-10-25T20:56:44.102Z Err	CreateChannel: [editChannel] Failed to edit channel in "19:47f93597a50e45bbb468ae424224cdc1@thread.skype" team.
2017-10-25T20:56:44.101Z Err	ChannelService: Error while updating channel : {"response":{"errorCode":"ChannelNameAlreadyExist","message":"Channel name already existed, please use other nameFailed to execute Skype backend request CreateThreadRequest. Request Url: https://emea-client-ss.msg.skype.com/v1/threads, Request Method: POST,. The server failed to respond correctly. Response Code: BadRequest, Reason: Bad Request. Response Headers: Pragma: no-cache\r\nContextId: tcid=736338011120028691,server=EAP010236252033\r\nCache-Control: no-s...

So I can see that things are failing.

Can you get he background process logs as well?

https://veenstra.me.uk/2017/08/07/microsoft-teams-how-to-troubleshoot-microsoft-teams-part-2/

[#13]

You can ignore my last comment. I'm getting the same issue.

CC: @Suphatra Rufo

[#14]

I have the same problem - is there a fix to this yet ?

Its absurd 

[#15]

It seems that uservoice has turned into a collection of bugs rather than new ideas for the product:

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17009224-recreate-deleted-chan...

[#16]

Hi, 

We've just started using Teams and have run into this annoying bug of not being able to reuse deleted channel names. As a workaround if you can restore the channel from Teams | Manage Team | Channels | Deleted you can then rename the channel to something unique like "alsdkfskldfgjskl" (to avoid it being reused in the future) and delete it again. This then allows you to create a new channel with the original name which will also create notes with a matching name. (As renaming a channel doesn't rename the notes and renaming the notes breaks the link between the channel and the notes)

Hope this helps some of you!

[#17]

Excellent workaround! Very helpful!

[#18]

I followed these instructions, but it won't let me change the name of the deleted channel. :( It looks like the only thing I can do is restore it and strip everything out of it, just to be able to use the name.  Really cumbersome and annoying. 

[#19]

This saved me heaps of time!!! Excellent..thanks Matthew Procter!

[#20 · Accepted solution]

Correct.

See Matthew's steps.
1) Restore the deleted channel

2) Rename to random / garbage name (thus freeing the name for re-use)
3) Delete this channel (with garbage name)
4) Create the channel with the origin / desired name

[#21]

Thanks John. 

That was a misstep by me - missed the restore step! 
Thank you for the guidance. Done and worked perfectly.

[#22]

Two years later I am having the same issue. I am both the owner of the team and the channel, but after restoring the channel I can't rename it.