Accounts moved tenant. Lost One Drive Files. Can we recover it?

Question

Hello all,

As a company we have two tenants. A domain that was deleted from the first tenant and then added on the second. We used the migration tool to move all the emails and their inboxes, but we forgot about the files in One Drive. Is there a way to recover these files?

Thank you,
Andreas

Answer 1

If the original tenant does not exist, no the files are lost. If it does, you should still be able to navigate to the tenant (login using a SharePoint admin or Global admin to the old tenant, https://tenantName.sharepoint.com/personal/<OneDrive_Site>.

If the ODfB sites have been deleted and it is within 30 days, you can recover them by using Get-SPODeletedSite -IncludeOnlyPersonalSites (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/get-spodeletedsite?view=sharepoint-ps) and restore using Restore-SPODeletedSite -Identity <site_guid> (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/restore-spodeletedsite?view=sharepoint-ps).

Answer 2

Hi @Andreas Andreou ,

Agree with trevor.

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 will be retained for the number of days you specify in the OneDrive admin center. The default is 30 days.

During this time, shared content can still be accessed by other users.

At the end of the time, the OneDrive will be in a deleted state for 93 days and can only be restored by a global or SharePoint admin.

More information:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restoring-a-deleted-onedrive-for-business-site-c5595183-a1ef-4931-8201-48a62134f5af

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