How to recover a deleted file from OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams

Deleted something you needed? Don’t panic. Files deleted from OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams go to a recycle bin first. For work accounts, they’re kept for 93 days unless your company changed that setting.

A file from your own OneDrive

1. Go to portal.office.com, select Apps, then OneDrive.
2. Select Recycle bin in the left pane.
3. Select the file or folder and choose Restore. It goes back to where it was.

Deleted it from the OneDrive folder on your computer? It’s in the same online recycle bin, so follow the same steps.

A file from a SharePoint site or Teams channel

Team files live on a SharePoint site, which has its own recycle bin.

1. Open the SharePoint site. From Teams, go to the channel’s Files tab and choose Open in SharePoint.
2. Select Recycle bin in the left menu. If you don’t see it, go to Settings (the gear) > Site contents and select Recycle bin at the top.
3. Select the file and choose Restore.

Anyone who can edit files on that site can restore something a coworker deleted, so you don’t need to find the person who did it.

Still can’t find it?

• Search the recycle bin by name, and sort by Date deleted.
• Deleted a whole folder? Restore the folder first. You can’t see the files inside it until it’s back.
• Someone emptied the recycle bin, or it’s been a while? Items can move to a second-stage recycle bin that IT can reach. Call IT soon, while it’s still within the 93 days.

The file wasn’t deleted, just changed?

If the file is still there but someone overwrote it or deleted part of it, you don’t need the recycle bin. Use version history to go back to an earlier copy. See How to restore an earlier version of a Word or Excel file.

Matter of Technology clients: can’t find a file? Submit a request with the file name, where it was saved, and roughly when it went missing, and we’ll track it down.