How to Restore Deleted Office 365 Groups

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Microsoft released the most awaited feature of restoring the deleted Office 365 Groups with all its feature and data. You can restore the deleted Office 365 Groups within retention period using PowerShell.

This feature is available from latest Azure AD Preview v2 PowerShell module. You can follow the installation steps from following Microsoft URL. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azuread/

Restoring Contents from deleted Office 365 Groups

After restoring the Office 365 Groups, you will get following features and properties in Office 365 Groups.

How to list out deleted Office 365 Groups using PowerShell

Default retention period for Office 365 Groups is 30 days. Run the following command to get all deleted Office 365 Groups which are in the retention period.

Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup

Result

Note the object-id of the Office 365 Group to be restored.

Restore Deleted Office 365 Groups Using PowerShell

Run the following command to restore the deleted Office 365 Groups

Restore-AzureADMSDeletedDirectoryObject –Id

Restoring the Office 365 Groups will takes few minutes but in some cases, it may take upto 24 hours for complete restore.

Note

To verify that the group has been restored successfully, run the following command

Get-AzureADGroup –ObjectId

How to Permanently delete Office 365 Groups before retention period

Some of Groups you don’t want to wait for retention period (30 day) for Permanent removal, so you can run the following command.

Remove-AzureADMSDeletedDirectoryObject –Id

Note You can get objectId value of Deleted Office 365 Group from Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup command.