How to delete items from the SharePoint Recycle Bin using PowerShell when there are large number of items in the Recycle Bin?

Question

How to delete items from the SharePoint Recycle Bin using PowerShell when there are large number of items in the Recycle Bin?

Nemeth, Dan 0

We just implemented retention labels on one of our very large SharePoint Online libraries, which caused the deletion of 800,000 files. Of course someone wanted a specific file restored, but it's impossible to scroll through the Recycle Bin web page to find the file. I wrote a PowerShell script to retrieve the items in the Recycle Bin which works. I was able to identify the item in the Recycle Bin using PowerShell and get a handle on it. I can return the properties of that item, but I cannot act upon it. I cannot restore it nor send it to the secondary recycle bin. The error returned is "The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold". So what I'm looking for is a method for restoring a file from a Recycle Bin that has a large number of items in it.

I have opened Microsoft Support ticket and they said they are asking internally (it has been 2 weeks) and that I should ask the question of the GitHub Community and here. So here it is!

Thanks in advance!

Dan Nemeth

2 answers

Your answer

Answer 1

Rich Matheisen 47,901

It would be helpful if you said how you were going about removing the item. Were you using its identity in the Clear-PnPRecycleBinItem cmdlet? Or are you using something else?

Nemeth, Dan 0 Reputation points

2025-04-21T15:51:09.6266667+00:00

Hi Rich,

Thank you for the prompt reply. I just realized that the title of my question is incorrect. It should say "How to RESTORE items". My apologies for the confusion and I understand why you answered the way you did. So to try to RESTORE this one file out of 800,000, I tried the following:

File ID: 436c3455-e0b2-419d-b30e-2110e718b9bf

I used a myriad of PnP commands which all eventually ended in a List View Threshold error.

Get-PnPRecycleBinItem -RowLimit 500000 | Where {$_.Id -eq "436c3455-e0b2-419d-b30e-2110e718b9bf"} | Restore-PnpRecycleBinItem -Force

Get-PnPRecycleBinItem -RowLimit 100 | Where {$_.Id -eq "436c3455-e0b2-419d-b30e-2110e718b9bf"} | Restore-PnpRecycleBinItem -Force

Move-PnPRecycleBinItem -Identity 436c3455-e0b2-419d-b30e-2110e718b9bf -Force

Restore-PnPRecycleBinItem -Identity 436c3455-e0b2-419d-b30e-2110e718b9bf -Force

$DeletedItems = Get-PnPRecycleBinItem -RowLimit 5000 | Where { $_.DirName -like "$DirPath*"}

ForEach($Item in $DeletedItems){

$Item | Restore-PnpRecycleBinItem -Force}

I can get a listing of all of the deleted files from the $DirPath which is how I know the file’s ID. The customer identified the file from my list of files produced by that command. And I can GET the file object into a variable in PowerShell, but I can’t move it to the secondary recycle bin nor restore it. So getting is not the problem. Acting upon the objects I get (other than writing out the values of their properties) is giving me the error.

I tried the Move command thinking if I could move the file to the secondary recycle bin, I could easily find and restore it from there since it's basically empty. But the ultimate goal is to restore the file.

I hope that make sense and once again, my apologies for the confusing title to my question

Thanks!

Dan
Rich Matheisen 47,901 Reputation points

2025-04-21T20:24:51.5166667+00:00

The Restore-PnPRecycleBinItem -Identity 436c3455-e0b2-419d-b30e-2110e718b9bf -Force should be all that you need. I think the default value for RowLimit is 200 if you don't provide a value for that parameter. According to the documentation the RowLImit doesn't have a default value, but it probably does, The RowLimit applies to the number of restored items.

I can see why you're running into problems when you use the pipline and "Where-Object" cmdlet because you're asking for all the items in the recycle bin. Using the items' identity should only have to return that single item.

I was going to suggest using a paged queries to avoid that 800,000 number. But the cmdlets don't have the ability to start at a specific point in the recycle bin.

This seems like it's something for the sharpoint folks that wrote the module need to address. The module isn't part of PowerShell, it's the team that maintains the code that needs to provide an application specific fix to their code.
Nemeth, Dan 0 Reputation points

2025-04-22T13:03:35.6+00:00

Yep I agree that it should work. But it doesn't. So I was hoping someone had an answer to what I'm doing wrong, or maybe an alternative method that they could share.

Thanks!

Dan

Answer 2

I'm going to qualify this answer with two facts:

I know next to nothing a SharePoint
The code below comes from Microsoft CoPilot -- and I have no was to verify that it will actually work.

# Define the site URL and item ID
$siteUrl = "https://yoursharepointsiteurl"
$itemId = "ItemID"
# Connect to SharePoint
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $siteUrl -Interactive
# Retrieve the item details
$response = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$siteUrl/_api/web/recyclebin('$itemId')" -Method Get -Headers @{"Accept"="application/json"}
# Check if the item exists
if ($response) {
    # Restore the item
    Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$siteUrl/_api/web/recyclebin('$itemId')/restore()" -Method Post -Headers @{"Accept"="application/json"}
    Write-Host "Item restored successfully."
} else {
    Write-Host "Item not found in the Recycle Bin."
}

I haven't been able to find any other way around the error you're encluntering.

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How to delete items from the SharePoint Recycle Bin using PowerShell when there are large number of items in the Recycle Bin?

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