OneDrive Second Stage Recycle Bin vs Regular Bin

The OneDrive Second Stage Recycle Bin is a game-changer for anyone who's ever accidentally deleted an important file or folder. It's a safety net that allows you to recover deleted items for up to 3 months, giving you a second chance to retrieve what you need.

This is a significant improvement from the regular OneDrive Recycle Bin, which only holds deleted items for 93 days. With the Second Stage Recycle Bin, you have a much longer window to recover your files.

One of the key benefits of the Second Stage Recycle Bin is that it's automatically enabled for all OneDrive users. You don't need to do anything to turn it on – it's just there, waiting to help you out when you need it.

The Second Stage Recycle Bin is also a great way to recover files that you've permanently deleted from your computer, but still exist in the cloud. This can be a lifesaver if you've deleted a file and then realized you need it again.

Restoring deleted items from OneDrive can be a lifesaver. You can recover deleted files and folders from the OneDrive Recycle Bin online.

To access the OneDrive Recycle Bin, you must have site collection administrator rights. This is a requirement to access the OneDrive site.

If you accidentally delete an item, you can restore it from the Recycle Bin. The Recycle Bin stores all deleted items, making it easy to recover them.

You can also use PowerShell to restore all your deleted files and folders from the Recycle Bin. This method requires site collection administrator rights as well.

Microsoft provides native tools to recover deleted files, including the ability to recover data directly from the computer's Recycle Bin or from the OneDrive Recycle Bin online.

Microsoft 365 content searches can find items stored in the OneDrive for Business Recycle Bin, contrary to the documentation. This was discovered through testing, where all efforts to uncover a situation where a content search couldn’t find an item failed.

Holds appear to work as well, and a retention label (a form of hold) doesn’t disappear when an item moves into the Recycle Bin. This means that items deleted from the Recycle Bin can still be recovered using Microsoft Purview.

Items deleted from the first- and second-stage Recycle Bin end up in the OneDrive preservation hold library, where they wait for their hold to expire. This can be accessed by selecting Site Contents from the cogwheel menu.

Microsoft’s text on this topic is unclear, but it’s clear that searches can find items in the OneDrive Recycle Bin. This is a useful feature for businesses that need to recover deleted data.

Here are some key points to keep in mind: