New feature: Recover deleted Office 365 Group via PowerShell

Microsoft

If you've deleted an Office 365 group, it's now retained by default for a period of 30 days. Within that period, you can now restore the group and its associated apps and data via a new PowerShell cmdlet.  For additional information please go to https://aka.ms/groupssoftdelete.

 

RestoreGroup.JPG

50 Replies

woot!

 

Is there a way for admins to know if/when an Office 365 Group is deleted?

you can now write a script that notifies you on a regular basis for instance using this new cmdlet: 

 

Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup | Sort-Object DisplayName| Format-Table Id, DisplayName, Description, Visibility

Finally, thanks for the update!
Thank you!!!!! When restoring a group will any data (Sharepoint Document Libraries) associated with the group be restored as well?
it does as mentioned in the document referred above:
"Group content that can be restored includes: (...) SharePoint Online team site and files"
Great news! Is it planned to know how long Groups have left in the recoverable state be available via these cmdlets?

From the documentation:

"You can also permanently delete a soft-deleted group if you can't wait the 30 days for the retention period to expire for the content to be permanently deleted."

Yes I saw the 30 days but when looking at a soft deleted Group you currently cannot see how many days it has left before permanent deletion or when it was deleted. I was just curious if this is something currently being talked about to surface through the supporting cmdlets. I believe I can get it through the audit log if needed.

@Brent Cordis try this script

https://practical365.com/collaboration/groups/powershell-script-generate-reports-groups-office-365/

 

We'll be updating it to flag whether deleted groups are still recoverable as well, now that the new feature is available.

cc @Christophe Fiessinger

Awesome news, glad you finally relased this feature! Some more information on what happens when you soft-delete a group might be useful, for example can the group still receive mail, what happens if some group content is on hold (i.e. how it is handled in respect to all workloads; what happens if you try to hard-delete), etc.

Cool thanks for this great news

Drew we will expose in a few weeks the deleted date/time property of each object, please stay tune.

@Christophe Fiessinger I've been testing this and there seems to be some inconsistency, or perhaps just delays in how the restoration is processed in the back end.


The issues I'm noticing are:

  • The Group owner/admin who deletes the Group is not included as a member when the Group is restored. In one case I had to go through the process of requesting to join, then approving my own request, to get back into the Group.
  • Some public Teams that have been restored are unable to be joined by others afterwards.

It's inconsistent though. Two Teams (one private, one public, both with an admin and a single non-admin member) were deleted and restored without issue. Meanwhile others that I restored over an hour ago are still unable to be joined.

 

I haven't noticed any issues within Outlook or Planner though (other than the cases where the admin wasn't restored), this is all Teams issues.

 

Edit: eventually it seems they've come good again. Is everything I saw there just the expected/possible delay of up to 24 hours for the full restoration process to complete?

Wow Paul, thanks for sharing your tests...it seems the feature might have some problems and I also will try to find some time to test it and confirm your results

@Juan Carlos González Martín see my edited post above. Might not be anything more than just a delay with some of the apps being fully restored. Bit of a rough experience overall.

Agree, and I would like to know if that it's the case...to me it makes sense taking into account what we know about delays when creating Groups from different sides...for instance the highest delay I'm currently seeing is the one that happens between you create a modern team site and you have the EXO inbox created

I've been testing with this (long awaited) feature and when I restore a deleted group, it doesn't re-appear in my Outlook 2016 client nor in the web client

 

When I search the group in the web client, I'm able to find and access it but it still won't show up in my list of groups...

 

It has been approx 24 hours since I restored the group btw. 

 

Am I missing something?