Announcing New OneDrive for Business feature: Files Restore
Published Jan 22 2018 08:39 AM 124K Views
Microsoft

Keeping your files safe and secure is our top priority. With 100+ data centers and Microsoft’s global network edge—combined with compliance standards, we offer customers trusted enterprise-grade compliance and security. Additionally, we empower administrators to safeguard organizational data using capabilities such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP), eDiscovery, service level encryption with customer-owned keys (currently in preview), and data retention controls with consistent management across Office 365.

 

Even with this level of sophistication, there are occasions where your files could be compromised due to accidental end-user deletion, file corruption, or malware infection. Until now the recovery process from such an event could take time and potentially result in data loss. That’s why we are excited to announce Files Restore for our OneDrive for Business customers.

 

Files Restore is a complete self-service recovery solution that allows administrators and end users to restore files from any point in time during the last 30 days. If a user suspects their files have been compromised, they can investigate file changes and allow content owners to go back in time to any second in the last 30 days. Now your users and your administrators can rewind changes using activity data to find the exact moment to revert to.

 

 To use Files Restore, all a user needs to do is choose Settings and then Restore OneDrive

OneDrive Settings PaneOneDrive Settings Pane

 

Users are presented with a histogram showing file activity over the last 30 days with an intuitive slider to “rewind” those changes.

Files Restore HistogramFiles Restore Histogram

 

They can then easily select the file or files to restore from that point in time.

Files Restore HistogramFiles Restore Histogram

 

The user then is prompted with a date range as well as the number of files to restore. The user chooses to restore and the files are then restored back into the users OneDrive.

Files Restore ProceedFiles Restore Proceed

 

As you can see, Files Restore for OneDrive for Business can save time and stress when file loss occurs, putting end users in control.

 

This capability starts rolling out today to all OneDrive for Business users and will continue to roll out over the next few weeks.

 

If you have questions about this feature or its functionality, make sure to check out the support documentation here and, please visit our UserVoice page to suggest new features or upvote feature requests

40 Comments
Silver Contributor
Well done. Congratulations on delivering this much requested feature!
Steel Contributor

Awesome, thank you.

 

Now, I can know the day of ransomware doing some, and the day of safe files 

Perfekt Self Service function

Great feature ! Congrats.

Copper Contributor
Is there a plan to bring this feature to personal OneDrive as well? That'd be awesome :)
Copper Contributor

A good idea can be developer the same features for SharePoint Library/all SharePoint site and also for list items!

Brass Contributor

Great news! Thanks @Stephen Rose !

Copper Contributor

Is this live now or still in preview? Tried it on my end and not seeing the restore option under settings.

Microsoft

Mike,

 

"This capability starts rolling out today to all OneDrive for Business users and will continue to roll out over the next few weeks." so it may not hit your tenant for a few weeks.

 

 

 

 

Copper Contributor

@Stephen Rose, will the roll out take place concurrently in Government and Commercial tenancies?

Microsoft

Steven,

 

Yes, this will roll to Government as well as Commerical at the same time.

Copper Contributor

Best ever, self service function

Brass Contributor

When is this feature expected to be rolled out to SharePoint sites as well?

 

Is there a plan to increase the timespan from 30 to 90 days?

Copper Contributor

Great feature. Thanks @Stephen Rose

Copper Contributor

Great feature @Stephen Rose. Just want to check will this new feature be available for SharePoint 2016 (OneDrive for Business)?

Brass Contributor

Great feature! I'm excited to share this information with my User group.

Iron Contributor

Hello

 

How long it will take to rollout for all Office 365 customers. Is there any preferred list of customer, where it will deployed for those?

 

Do we also need to do some setting on tenant level, pls confirm?

 

Avian

Microsoft

Avian,

 

It should be in everyone's tenant by the middle of Feb. There are no settings you need to do on your end to make this happen.

Copper Contributor

Great feature. Thank You.

Brass Contributor

This is really great! Good job! I think the answer is no, but I will ask anyway. @Stephen Rose Is there any way to do a selective restore? Say I want to restore to a point 3 days back in time, but I only want changes made to a subset of files to apply. Is that possible? 

Copper Contributor

Our tenant have't show this restore feature. When will release to production?

Iron Contributor
So we're starting to see the feature... or at least parts of it. We now have the restore option and when we go to "Custom date and time" the slider is there, but the bars for each day don't show up and more importantly no files/changes are shown. I'm assuming that's because the feature is not fully rolled out yet?
Deleted
Not applicable

I am super pumped for this feature! I am guessing it isn't completely rolled out to our tenant yet. We see the option, but data doesn't appear when the date is selected.

Microsoft

CC Adeyemo

 

Try choosing a custom date range to see all the files.

Deleted
Not applicable

@Stephen Rose a colleague and I tried that too. We see this.

 

restore onedrive.PNG

Iron Contributor

Yup, it’s the same thing we see as @Deleted

Iron Contributor

I also noticed none of the delete files are appearing If I select any options including custom date and time. I can see the option for restore OneDrive under setting option. But deleted files are not appearing.

 

However when I checked in another tenant, options is not appearing under settings, but if I directly give url as

https://<my.sharepoint.com>/personal/username_com/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?p=18

 

I can see the Restore my OneDrive, but deleted files are not appearing for any of the option including Custom Date and Time, looks url is activated, but it is not rolled out for this tenant.

 

Please advise.

Copper Contributor
@Stephen Rose Will this feature also roll-out to sharepoint? And if so do you know when ?

@Stephen Rose I don't want to sound too negative here, but have you folks tested this against a "real life" usage scenario? The interface is all nice and dandy... until you try to browse the actual file list. My ODFB usage is "moderate" at best, but I still have hundreds of events per day, and the flashy controls simply cant handle those. Just the amount of time it takes for the complete list to load (and all the scrolling) is beyond annoying. Would be nice if you show some numbers on the chart, as the only way to get them is to scroll down to the corresponding date.

 

The performance is another issue - IE in particular handles it very bad, with freezes, high CPU usage and so on. On other browsers, the screen flickers, RAM usage spikes, and the most annoying part - every time I scroll down to get another "batch" of entries, all the Groups (the date-based grouping) auto-expand. Regardless of how many times I've collapsed them before. Surely there's a better way to handle this?

 

I can certainly live with a crappier, but more "responsive" interface.

Copper Contributor

Thanks for sharing this! Really a nice feature and it can help key users.

Iron Contributor

Hi,

When I choose the restore option, for some reason, I do not see the histogram showing the file activities. The only option I see is to select a date and then process is initiated. After the completion of the process, it doesn’t show any summary either (like how many files were restored). @Stephen Rose wouldn’t it be beneficial to have that feature?

Copper Contributor

I work for a municipality and we have OneDrive of business. When we try to access the File Restore, we are getting animated dots at the top of our browser for all users. The rest of the page is blank.

 

Any idea as to what would cause this and how we might get it resolved?

 

Regards,

JasonN

Microsoft

Jason,

 

Try choosing "custom date and time". See if that works.

Copper Contributor

I'm unable to get that far. Nothing populates on the screen, only the dots at the top of our browser or am I missing something.

Copper Contributor

We've tried multiple browsers, IE with compatibility mode, on our LAN and off. All other 365 services as well as OneDrive work fine but not that function.

 

 

Microsoft

Jason, are you in Modern or Classic view? This feature only works in the Modern View. Can I also assume you are not using on-prem?

Iron Contributor

We had a similar issue to begin with, as I have also written in this thread, but after a couple of weeks the full UI showed up. Could be something like that?

Copper Contributor

@Stephen Rose: I think you hit the nail on the head. We had to set a system-wide classic view to correct an issue of OneDrive not showing the forward and reverse arrow keys. We will have to revert back then give it a try. I bet you are correct.

 

I'll test and reply back with my findings.

 

Many thanks for your prompt response!

 

Regards,
Jason

For more info, also try the Restore your OneDrive article on office.com: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/restore-your-onedrive-fa231298-759d-41cf-bcd0-25ac53eb8a15. Let us know if there's anything we can explain better in the article, too. 

Copper Contributor

In the event where the original file is being attacked by malware and get corrupted.  Will I be able to restore from the previous date?

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