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Recover a deleted organization

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Azure DevOps Services

After you delete an organization, it's disabled but available for 28 days. If you change your mind during this time, you can recover the organization. After 28 days, the organization and data are permanently deleted. In rare cases, our deletion process might take up to 70 days due to backend retries and the need to delete data from multiple sources.

Prerequisites

Category Requirements
Permissions Organization owner. For more information about specific scenarios, see the following instructions:
- When you don't have an Azure DevOps Administrator
- Resolve orphaned organization when your Azure DevOps Administrator is a member of the target organization
- Resolve orphaned organization when your Azure DevOps Administrator isn't a member of the target organization
Deletion time frame An organization deleted within the last 28 days.

Note

If there's no owner for the deleted organization and you're an active Project Collection Administrator and member of the deleted organization, you still can't access Organization settings to assign a new owner. If this is your scenario, contact Support.

Recover organization

  1. Sign in to your Visual Studio profile.

    Why am I asked to choose between my work or school account and my personal account?

  2. On your profile page, go to the lower Organizations Pending Deletion section, find the organization you want to restore, and then select Restore.

    Screenshot showing organizations pending deletion with highlighted Restore button.

  3. In the resulting popup page, select Restore to confirm.

    • If your organization URL is still available, you can restore it.

      Screenshot showing highlighted Restore button.

    • If your organization URL isn't available, provide a new URL, and then select Restore.

  4. After you restore your organization, do the following tasks:

    • If billing was previously set up for your organization, relink your organization to an Azure subscription.
    • If your organization was connected to Microsoft Entra ID for authenticating user access, you don't have to reconnect it.