Restore a deleted wiki in Microsoft Teams

[Corina Pepe]

I wanted to delete a blank new page in the wiki, instead, I ended up deleting an entire page (with all its sections) full with content. How can I restore the deleted content? 

[#2]

Is it not in the site collection recycle bin on the attached SharePoint site? I know they are just pages in a list somewhere so it might show there. Not sure how it interacts and renders in Teams thou, there may not be a way to do it currently.

[#3]

Just checked and I cannot find a way to restore it. It does warn you about permanently deleting it when you do delete a page. Not seeing in recycle bin :(.

[#4]

You can restore it, give me a few mins to finish writing up how, it's not supported and far from simple but we can get here.

[#5]

This some kind of SPD magic or something? I was poking around at it but got off on a tangent working on something else! Guessing the pages never get deleted just meta data changed to delete?

Actually, just wait I'll read your post :)

[#6 · Accepted solution]

So this is far from simple to achieve, I'm sure that Microsoft will bring a easy interface at some point but in the meantime you can dig around in SharePoint to find the data and restore it.

1. Add a new page and edit it, we need to make sure the wiki has been recently changed to allow us to find the hidden list in a later step. Just add a new page and some words, you can remove it later.
2. Navigate from Teams to the associated SharePoint site, clicking on the files tab then Open in SharePoint is a good route.
3. Now you are in SharePoint, look for the Cog at the top, and choose Library Settings
4. Now look in the left most column, you'll see a list of parts of the site, at the bottom is a section called recent. Under recent there should be some long looking number starting with 19:, this is the hidden list that contains your wiki, click it
5. Now you'll see a list of items, these represent the various elements of the wiki, click on the words that say 'Page' and look at the detail on the right, find the entry that has wikiTitle matching your lost page, look down the list for the value wikiDeleted which you'll see says Yes.
6. Click that with the mouse and it'll turn into a toggle you can now turn to No
7. Go back and look for your page in the Wiki

If it was the page you deleted then this should be it, the sections don't seem to be changed to deleted but you could always repeat the process.

Good Luck! I'm sure this isn't supported, and you probably could do all kinds of damage to your wiki from the list, so be super careful.

[#7]

It is kind of stupid to not have any version protection so users can roll-back in case they accidentally blow stuff away, or what to revert to a different historical point in time.

[#8]

it's not working for me.

[#9]

Agreed, COMPLETELY baffled why there isn't even simple shadow copy/previous version support since all these tabs and susch are just files.  It's extremely disappointing. 

We were starting to invest heavily into this platform to streamline some business process using Forms, Wiki's, & Flow. But with this absurd inability to monitor/restore your own site files, this is simply a deal breaker.   We can't do any further development due to lack of data integrity and complete joke of Admin support. 

[#10]

I have this problem too.  If you delete the Wiki tab it deletes the web page.  It does not show in the recycle bin! 

I'm having to direct users to NOT USE WIKI!!! 

Why is there an UNUSUABLE PRODUCT there?  Ugh. 

[#11]

By this time I figure Microsoft would add some comments about what they're going to do to address these short-comings. Failing all this I may well just build my own feature rich Wiki using some open source tool kit and application.

[#12]

I made this mistake under the Wiki personal app, found my deleted items in OneNote - Site Settings - recent. Note that I couldn't view the page or selection details to remove the check on the wikiDeleted setting until I clicked "Return to classic SharePoint".

[#13]

Anyone have any alternative suggestions to Wiki?  Just discovered this shortcoming with not being able to recover, and we have some Wiki's with a lot of information in them that would bad to lose.  I keep suggesting OneNote but I keep getting complaints about how slow the interface is through Teams...

[#14]

I so much wish this issue was addressed seriously.  I really love the idea of the Wiki tab.  It's just horribly implemented.  I mean horrible because if you don't know you can loose all your data.  That really sucks.

So far the only thing that has worked is recovery from deleting a section of a Wiki but not when removing the whole tab.  

I guess the best thing to do would be to not use Wiki in its current form.  Maybe just use SharePoint Wiki and the Website app to display it.

[#15]

I'm sorry to hear you lost your data. The wiki also isn't searchable, which seems crazy to me. OneNote may be a viable replacement, as it's flexible and has it's own versioning and recycle bin.  Good luck!

[#16]

@Steven Collier Brilliant Steven, thank you for this work-around to get to the Teams Wiki bin! Got everything restored. Many thanks!

Wout

[#17]

@Steven Collier Seems like this only works when the tab hasn't been removed, i.e. basically the whole wiki except for some changes in pages/sections. It's stored in a MHT file which doesn't show up in the Recycle Bin. Or in that Recent list.

I know it's not the same situation as TO had, but still might be relevant to others.

[#18]

Thanks, That worked for the page, thanks@Steven Collier .

However, I couldn't get the sections....

[#19]

@Steven Collier  Thank you for the information.  I was not able to restore the section into Teams, but I could see the content and I just copied and pasted into a Word document to recreate the section later.  I will move my wiki to Word using headings and a table of contents rather than taking the chance of the whole tab being deleted!

[#20]

@Steven Collier  do you happen to know whether Teams Wiki are covered by retention policies - we have a sharepoint policy for documents and an exchange one for chat but I think Wiki's may fall through the crack?

[#21]

Hi @Steven Collier 

My problem here is the wikiContent? How will I retrieve it? Because all the contents in that wiki section has been emptied. :(

Also, how would I know who removed the contents?

Thank you.