Hi John Eagar,
Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A Platform! Thank you for asking your question here.
If your environment was purged by policy after 30 days, unfortunately, it means that the virtual machine (VM) and its associated data have been permanently deleted and cannot be directly recovered. However, there are a few steps you can take to potentially restore your environment:
- Verify if there are any backups available for the VM. If you have been using Azure Backup or any other backup solution, you can restore the VM from the latest backup.
- If soft delete was enabled for your Azure resources, you might be able to recover the VM. Soft delete allows recovery of deleted resources within a specified retention period. For more information, refer to the Recover deleted artifacts with soft delete policy in Azure Container Registry (Preview).
- If no backups are available and soft delete was not enabled, you will need to recreate the environment by setting up a new VM and reconfiguring it as needed.
- To prevent this from happening again, review your resource management and deletion policies. You can read more about managing resources using Azure Policy here: Azure Policy Overview
For detailed guidance, please refer to the official Microsoft documentation:
How to restore Azure VM data in Azure portal
Back up Azure VMs in a Recovery Services vault
Create a VM from a specialized disk by using PowerShell
If you have any further queries, do let us know. If the comment is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and "Upvote".