Accidentally deleted all indexes in Azure Cognitive Search — is there any way to recover them?

Question

Accidentally deleted all indexes in Azure Cognitive Search — is there any way to recover them?

Rohini Vaidya 20

Hi all,

I accidentally deleted all indexes in my Azure AI Search service. These indexes contained critical schema definitions and ingested data. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any backup of the index definitions or the data in a separate storage.

Is there any way to recover deleted indexes or restore them from Azure’s backend, logs, or support?

I understand that Azure Cognitive Search does not have a built-in recycle bin, but I’m hoping there’s something that can be done via Azure support or internal recovery tools.

If not, what are the best practices for index backup/restore going forward?

Thanks in advance.

Bhargavi Naragani 3,820 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2025-05-06T07:01:51.48+00:00
Hi @Rohini Vaidya,

You're correct! Unfortunately, Azure Cognitive Search does not offer a built-in recovery mechanism (like a recycle bin or soft delete) for indexes. Once deleted, indexes including their schema and any data ingested into them, cannot be restored natively through the Azure portal, CLI, or API. This applies to indexers and data sources as well.

Even though Microsoft maintains internal backups for platform reliability and disaster recovery, these are not available for customer-initiated recovery operations, including accidental deletions. So, if the indexes were removed via the portal, API, or automation, the data is permanently lost from the search service.

Check if you have copies of the index schema elsewhere, maybe in a development repo, a CI/CD pipeline, Infrastructure-as-Code (ARM/Bicep/Terraform), or Postman collections.

If you used Azure Search SDKs or ARM templates to create or manage indexes, see if they are stored in version control (e.g., GitHub or Azure DevOps).

Contact Microsoft Support: While recovery is generally not possible, it's still worth opening a support ticket to see if anything can be done from the backend (especially if the deletion was recent and due to a service bug or UI issue). Be clear about the urgency and the scope of the loss.

Create a support request: https://portal.azure.com/#view/Microsoft_Azure_Support/HelpAndSupportBlade/~/overview

To prevent similar issues in the future, consider implementing the following best practices:

Define your Azure Cognitive Search service and related resources using ARM templates. Microsoft.Search/searchServices - ARM Template

Maintain your index definitions as JSON files in a version-controlled repository (e.g., GitHub, Azure DevOps). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/templates/microsoft.search/2020-08-01/searchservices?pivots=deployment-language-bicep

If you're ingesting data from external sources (like Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL Database, or Cosmos DB), ensure that the original data is stored securely, allowing for re-ingestion if necessary.

Regularly Export Index Definitions, implement scripts using PowerShell or REST APIs to periodically export and back up your index definitions and configurations. Create Index - Azure AI Search

I hope you find this information useful. Let me know if you have any further questions.

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Answer 1

Hello Rohini Vaidya,

Thanks for your question.

Unfortunately, there’s no built-in way to recover it. There’s no recycle bin or automatic backup feature for indexes or the data within them, so deletion is permanent.

I know that’s not great news, especially if the indexes were critical. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend reaching out to Azure Support just in case there’s anything they can do behind the scenes

To do this:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/create-ticket

You can mark it 'Accept Answer' and 'Upvote' if this helped you

Regards,

Abiola

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Accidentally deleted all indexes in Azure Cognitive Search — is there any way to recover them?

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