Forum Discussion
OneDrive for Business
I am a global admin for a medium sized corporation. In all my years, I’ve never had anyone do this - We terminated an employee and before she turned in her laptop, she deleted one folder from her OneDrive that contained 145,000 files (83gb). I thought it would be an easy task to restore them, but after three days, I’m reaching out for help.
When I create a link to OneDrive from the users profile, I don’t see a recycle bin. When I go to the direct URL for that recycle bin, It comes up, but my only option is to “empty recycle bin”. Here, I can select up the 2000 items and hit “restore” and it works, but I can only select 100 at a time and then another hundred and another hundred. If it goes past 2000 I get an error.
in Powershell, I’ve tried using modules Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.Powershell as well as PNP.Powershell but it doesn’t give me an option to restore these files. I can find documentation online to restore a OneDrive account back to a certain date (which would be perfect) But apparently, it only works for personal OneDrive accounts. That makes no sense.
Has anyone ever had to do something like this before? Is it even possible? Even built another laptop and installed O365 for this user - still no recycle bin.
Thanks for any advice.
- Why not login as the user and try the "Restore" functionality? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restore-your-onedrive-fa231298-759d-41cf-bcd0-25ac53eb8a15
Otherwise, CSOM/Graph API based script is your best option.
And make sure to add her account to a retention policy in order to avoid permanent data loss (should be standard in most enterprises due to all the compliance requirements nowadays).- I appreciate your reply. After I posted my question, I took a new laptop out of the box and set it up as her and installed O365 Business Premier. As I mentioned before, that “restore” function is only for personal office 365 accounts. That is exactly what I could use with our domain accounts - I’m not sure why we don’t have that functionality.
Thank you for taking the time to reply.- No it is not, you can use it with OneDrive for Business too. I am not sure though if it is supported when accessing the drive as delegate, thus the suggestion to login as the user herself. If you feel adventurous, you can try in on behalf, use:
https://tenant-my.sharepoint.com/personal/user_domain_com/?p=18
