Restore Onedrive Files Older Than 30 Days

[Albertina Drybread]

Withversion history, you can see and restore older versions of your files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint. Version history works with all file types, including Microsoft 365 files, PDFs, CAD files, photos, videos, and more. If you need to, you may be able to restore deleted OneDrive files or restore deleted SharePoint items from the recycle bin.

If you're signed in to OneDrive or SharePoint with a work or school account (such as a Microsoft 365 account), select the ellipses (...) next to the version of the document that you want to restore, and then click Restore.

If you have the OneDrive sync app installed on your PC, right-click the file that you want to restore to an earlier version in File Explorer and select Version history. Then select the ellipses (...) next to the version you want and click Restore.

If you sign in with a personal Microsoft account, you can retrieve the last 25 versions. If you sign in with a work or school account, the number of versions will depend on your library configuration.

If you're using OneDrive as part of SharePoint Server, your administrator may have turned off document versioning. For more information about SharePoint versioning settings (which also apply to OneDrive for work or school) see Enable and configure versioning for a list or library or How does versioning work in a list or library?

If you're signed in to OneDrive with a Microsoft account, items in the recycle bin are automatically deleted 30 days after they're put there. If your recycle bin is full, the oldest items will be automatically deleted after three days. If you're signed in with a work or school account, items in the recycle bin are automatically deleted after 93 days, unless the administrator has changed the setting. See more information about how long deleted items are kept for work or school accounts.

When you delete a user in the Microsoft 365 admin center (or when a user is removed through Active Directory synchronization), the user's OneDrive is retained for the number of days you specify in the SharePoint admin center. (For info, see Set the default file retention for deleted OneDrive users.) The default is 30 days. During this time, other users can still access shared content. At the end of the time period, the OneDrive remains in a deleted state for 93 days and can only be restored by a SharePoint Administrator.

If the user was deleted within 30 days, you can restore the user and all their data from the Microsoft 365 admin center. To learn how, see Restore a user in Microsoft 365. If you deleted the user more than 30 days ago, the user will no longer appear in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and you need to use PowerShell to restore the OneDrive.

A user's OneDrive URL is based on their username. For example, -my.sharepoint.com/personal/user1_contoso_com. You can find their username on the Active users (or Deleted users) page in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Im trying to sync a folder to onedrive, however it contains a few files that are frequently changed. I dont want to constantly sync these changes. Is it possible to only sync file changes when the modification time is > 1 day difference between the local copy and the remote synced copy?

The general rule that applies when you use filtering with sync is that all files that fall outside the filter are completely ignored on both sides. (ie. filtering applies on both ends).

--dry-run is a good flag to run any time you aren't quite sure about a command. It will simulate what happens but not actually perform any actions so you can take a look and see that the result looks reasonable. It is always wise to be careful about using sync until you understand it fully since "wrong" commands have the potential of deleting something you didn't intend to delete (although you would always be able to recover it from the Gdrive trashbin with some effort in an emergency).

The OneDrive has a built-in recycle bin which will save the deleted files for 30 days. So, you can restore files from OneDrive recycle bin. Follow all the steps that are mentioned below to start OneDrive restore deleted files.

OneDrive will create a special folder on your computer with the same name as OneDrive. This folder automatically stores all backup files with real-time monitoring. So, there are two benefits to the users: a complete backup of OnDrive is to be stored in two places. One is over the cloud, and the other one is over the local folder of your system.

Check your files are there or not. If the delete OneDrive files are not found there, they should be permanently deleted. You can read on to learn how to recover permanently deleted files from OneDrive.

In this part, we will discuss how to restore OneDrive files to a previous time in detail. Microsoft has introduced a new feature to protect its users from ransomware. This is a very beneficial data protection feature that will allow you to recover all OneDrive files to a previous version.

The methods mentioned above may not be able to help recover deleted files OneDrive due to the fact that you cant recover files from OneDrive after 30 days. The last OneDrive undelete method is to use professional data recovery software. There are a lot of choices in the market. We are going to introduce a data recovery tool - Tenorshare 4DDiG, that has high success rate in recovering OneDrive files older than 30 days.

This tool is safe and secure to recover deleted files from OneDrive, hard drive, external drive or other storage devices. The interface is super simple, but the algorithm in the software is the most advanced technology.

When the scan is completed, you can look up the lost file(s) according to file type or name. Most of files have a preview feature. Choose the file(s) you need and click the Recover button. A window prompts to choose a location. You are not recommended to save the file(s) to the original drive.

It is not possible to get a message trace for more than 90 days. You can perform an eDiscovery/Content search, but it will retrieve messages that are currently available in the given mailbox. However, you can use tools like the AdminDroid office 365 auditing tool to store and search message traces for an indefinite period.

Backup wise, there is Veeam they have a decent product for backing up mailboxes, you also get OneDrive and SharePoint sites as well. Another product we are looking at is CodeTwo at their Office365 backup solution.

To recovery or lookup something you can use eDiscovery then you can export the results as a PST file and do what you need to do with them. Now when it comes times to export the eDiscovery results you need to use Edge to do so, you cannot use any other browser per good ole Microsoft.

Another fun thing I found is if you are searching for say joe....@email.com and you set the sender/author or sender to look for joe....@email.com then say you also have a user with the same name but the email address is jsm...@company.com, when you run a eDiscovery search or content search because of Microsoft reasons since both accounts have the same first and last name both will be searched against and included in the search results, so you will receive results for all the emails that joe....@email.com plus all the emails jsm...@company.com sent. In order to get emails just for joe....@email.com you need to search for joe.smith@email*

Are you telling me that even if a users deletes an email from his mailbox (gone also from DELETED folder), I can still find that email using eDiscovery (if I have retention policy in place and that email was still protected by that policy)?

Unless you have enabled hold on the mailbox (while in this case since it is a shared mailbox, it is not supposed to have a license assigned to enable hold), I suppose the message should have been completely deleted and no longer searchable.

Retention policy (in another word Messaging Records Management (MRM) policy in this case) is used to periodically archive and delete emails from the mailbox, it cannot prevent emails from being deleted, which is not the same as hold.

That is how have our policy setup. Based on what I was told by our CSP is that is how the policy should be setup. One thing I do know is it take a healthy amount of time for that policy to be applied. I have done some light testing with trying to retrieve some test emails I deleted and things look good so far. I am going to do some more extensive testing sometime in Q2. We are hoping to use these retention policies as a replacement for our Barracuda Archiver.

Retention Policy: You can set up a retention policy in Exchange Online to retain emails for a longer period of time, up to 7 years. More information on how to do this can be found at Message Trace Older Than 90 Days - Microsoft Community Hub

In-Place eDiscovery & Hold: In-Place eDiscovery & Hold allows you to search for and preserve all email data in Exchange Online, including deleted and archived items. You can learn more about how to use this feature at the same link as above.

Third-party Tools: There are third-party tools such as MailsDaddy O365 Backup, that allow you to backup Exchange Online data, including emails, and store it in a local or cloud-based repository. This can provide a longer retention period and make it easier to search for and retrieve older emails. A discussion on this topic can be found at Reddit - Dive into anything

Im surprised no one is talking about the exchange message trace log which can only provide 90 days retention. How can this be preserved for a year? How do other orgarnizations back this up? Better still how do they automate it? From ChatGPT this can be automated using azure functions to export the CSV and store the logs in Azure Storage using Backup every 90 days. This still seems a bit whimsical and I would like to look around if someone already figured this out.

3a8082e126