SharePoint has provided two levels of recycle bins to roll back the accidental deletion of documents. Once it is deleted from the Library, it first goes to the Site level recycle bin from where you can restore it. If it is still deleted from there, it goes to the Site Collection recycle bin (Also known as Second Stage Recycle Bin). Only the site collection administrator can restore from the second stage recycle bin. The documents will remain in the recycle bin for a period of 90 days after which they are purged.
In this blog, we will see how to restore from these two recycle bins in SharePoint Online.
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Say, we have two documents in the Shared Documents Library. Let’s go ahead and delete them. It will be moved to the recycle bin. We can spot the recycle bin in the quick launch.
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If it is missing in the quick launch, you can find it from the Site contents page.
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Select the documents and click on restore to roll back the deletion.
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Instead, if we click on Delete Selection, It will be moved to the second stage recycle bin.
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You can go to the second stage recycle bin by either appending ‘_layouts/15/AdminRecycleBin.aspx?View=2&ql=1’ in the browser URL or by clicking on the link below,
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Here also, you can do the restoration of the deleted items, provided you are the site collection administrator.
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Going back to the library, we can see the restored items.
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Summary - Thus, we saw how to restore documents from Site and Site Collection level recycle bin in SharePoint Online.