Retrieve Form and responses when the original creator shared the form with me.

Question

A form was created by someone else and shared with me. They have left their organisation and I suspect that the form has been deleted - not by them personally but by someone in their organisation. Can I retrieve the responses??

Answer 1

Hi @CARMAN, Ruth (NHS ENGLAND),

Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A Forum.

The ability to access the old form data is determined by your permissions as a tenant administrator rather than as an external guest.

Typically, if a user creates a form via https://forms.office.com/, by default this will linked to their personal account only. Furthermore, the data is not stored anywhere outside the form itself, and is not protected by retention policies.

Individually created forms therefore have the following limitations and risks:

• If a user account is deleted, the form data is deleted after 30 days.
• The form can be recovered only during this 30 day window, it is not possible to recover the data afterwards.
• Personal form data is not stored in Exchange or SharePoint or any accessible location, and is not held if you have retention policies.
• Although the responses can be downloaded as an Excel file, this is only generated on request.

If that data should in any way persist or not be tied to an individual user, forms should not be created using https://forms.office.com and instead be linked to a group

 

If a user has already left, an admin can recover the form for up to 30 days after the account has been deleted. The requirements are:

• Your account needs to be global administrator or office application administrator of the organization and have a valid Forms license.
• The employee whose form you want to transfer has an account that has been deleted or disabled.
• The form is transferred within 30 days of when an account was deleted (no limit if the account is just disabled).

This means only administrators from the form owner’s organization can retrieve the form if the owner's account got deleted. Shared users do not have permissions to retrieve or interact with it.

 

You can request the admin to retrieve the data for you by do the following steps to transfer ownership and recover the form:

• Go to https://forms.office.com/Pages/delegatepage.aspx?originalowner=[*email address*]
• On the form, click More form actions, and then select Move.
• Choose to move to your user account, or a group.
• Note: if you don’t see a group, make sure you are a group owner. If it’s a Teams as well as a Microsoft 365 group, remove yourself and add yourself via Teams admin.

If the user was deleted more than 30 days ago, you will see an error:

See Admin information - Microsoft Forms Admin | Microsoft Learn for more information.

I hope this provides enough clarity and helps you stay inform with your current situation.

In the meantime, if you see my replies bring helpful information, please kindly accept it as an answer and vote it up by your original account, which raised this question. Once marked, it will automatically pin to top. As other users will also search information in this community, your valuable vote up will definitely also help other users who have similar queries easily to find the correct channel and useful information more quickly.   

 

Thank you for your patience and your understanding. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to share them in the comments on this post so I can continue to support you.    

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Answer 2

If the original creator of the form has left the organization and the form has been deleted, you will not be able to retrieve the responses. When a user account is deleted from the Microsoft Entra ID (which includes Microsoft Forms), all account-related data, including form responses, is deleted 30 days after the user has been deleted. If the form was shared with you but the original creator's account has been deleted, the responses associated with that form are also no longer recoverable.

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References:

• User account information
• Microsoft Forms and user accounts