Microsoft Teams Conversations in Private Channels Suddenly vanished How can I find them

[KarenSilk2757]

I set up a Sales Team One:One 'Team' and created private channels for each member of the team.  To type up key discussion points each week to form an HR record of progress.  For no obvious reason all chats have vanished.  Each team member still exists as a member but the One:One team looks like it has never been used.  I started doing this for weekly meetings from March 2021, so a lot of important data lost.  How can I retrieve this information?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@KarenSilk2757 Luckily, generally, data does not just vanish. Can you sign into the Teams web application to check if the data is still there? You can do so at https://teams.microsoft.com. If the data is visible there, it's usually a "caching problem", and you may want to try and completely sign out of Teams and remove the cache. If the data is also not visible there, there's a few things that could be going on:

* Someone deleted content

* There's a retention policy set to automatically delete content after a specific period of time

* Something terribly bad happened with the Teams infrastructure and your data was deleted for some other reason

In those cases, generally the data is really gone unless a legal hold was set. If a legal hold is configured, data can be found using eDiscovery by someone who has the correct permissions on the Microsoft 365 tenant. Finally, it never hurts to open a ticket with Microsoft to see if they can still recover any data.

[#3]

@pvanberlo Thank you for your suggestions I will try them out and see how I get on, I will let you know.

[#4]

Thank you for your help, we were able to look at the problem in a different way. We found each conversation saved as an email, so I have been able to retrieve the data.