How to recover files of an employee that has left?

[BoxOfFrogs]

An employee left the company about 6 months ago. I removed his account giving his manager rights to it and forwarding his email to her.

She is asked me if I can recover his OneDrive files now.  Is that possible, and if so, what would the process be?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@BoxOfFrogs 

Hi, given that you have said that you "removed his account giving his manager rights to it and forwarding his email to her", I am assuming your M365 users are cloud only and not synced with on-premises AD and that you configured as follows when deleting the original user?

If this is the case, then the manager would have had 30 days to access the OneDrive and copy any items she needed.  

The only other possibility would be if you had a retention policy applied to that users OneDrive account?

[#3]

@PeterRising Nuts, you would be correct on all counts other then the retention policy.

[#4]

As PeterRising said, unfortunately without a retention policy set to retain files longer than 6 months for the user in this case, they are gone like the wind....

Adam