How to Recover Deleted Outlook Items in Office 365

If you’ve ever lost or deleted a Microsoft Outlook email or important attachment file, don't worry, it happens to the best of us. And if you need to restore Outlook items that you thought you wouldn't need anymore, there's an easy way to do it. You can even restore permanently deleted files—a hard delete in which data is erased from the database—if you are using Exchange Online in Office 365. 

The Office 365 suite has basic functionality for recovery, so it's helpful if you've recently deleted a file. But Exchange Online only keeps permanently deleted items for 14 days by default, and then only to a maximum of 30 days. More on that later.

Here are the steps for recovering deleted Outlook items in Office 365—within that preset timeframe. 

Recover Deleted Outlook Items From the Deleted Items Folder

1. Look for the deleted file in the Deleted Items or Trash folder in Outlook.
   
   If you can find your file there, your folder list determines your next step:
   
   If the Trash folder is in your folder list, you can restore items from the Trash folder to your other folders. But you can’t recover items that have been deleted from the trash folder.
   
   If there are Deleted Items in your folder list, follow these steps to recover deleted email messages, appointments, events, contacts, and tasks that have been removed from the Deleted Items folder.
2. If an item is still in your Deleted Items folder, it can still be recovered (Outlook 2013, Outlook 2016, Microsoft 365). Just locate the item and move it back to the proper location in your folder list. You can’t recover a file that’s been permanently deleted.
3. Select the item you want to restore, right-click on it, then select Move > Other Folder then select the folder where you want to move the item.

The Outlook Recoverable Items Folder

If the item you’re looking for isn’t in the Deleted Items folder, the next place to look is the Recoverable Items folder. This is a hidden folder where you’ll find items that have been deleted or emptied from the Deleted Items folder or permanently deleted from your inbox or another folder using Shift+Delete.

To recover Recoverable Items, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you’re connected to your mail server.
2. In Outlook, select Deleted Items from your email folder list. (If you only see a Trash folder, you’re out of luck).
3. In the Folder menu, select Recover Items Deleted from this folder.
4. Select the items you want to recover, select Recover Deleted Items, then select OK.

After you recover an item, you can find it in your Deleted Items folder and then move it to another folder.

Exchange Online users will benefit from Mailbox Litigation Hold, which the administrator can enable to save data permanently. This mode is useful in case you need to restore deleted Outlook items.

Consider Cloud Backup for SaaS Applications

Say you’ve lost or deleted an Outlook email or attachment, and it’s well past the Microsoft 30-day retention period. An effective, cloud-based SaaS backup solution makes recovering items easy. If you’re using Outlook, it’s likely you’re using other Microsoft 365 products. What if a true disaster strikes? Is all your Microsoft data protected?

Arcserve SaaS Backup does just that, offering a complete solution to protect data across key Microsoft 365 workloads, including Exchange Online, Teams, Groups, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Public Folders.

Here are other key features of Arcserve SaaS Backup.

• Easy deployment with the initial setup taking less than 5 minutes.
• Simple interface that has user and non-user data neatly organized to facilitate easy navigation.
• Most cost-effective solution with a single price per seat that includes all SaaS data protection functionalities.
• Unlimited retention of your backups through the life of your subscription.
• Limitless data storage in an online cloud tier, allowing fast access and restores.
• No additional charges for data traffic: no ingress, egress, or transaction fees.
• Universal restore view gives a complete overview of all backup sets. A search can be performed across all historical data sets to restore data deleted years ago or in the recent past.
• Ultra-fast search lets users quickly locate, securely preview, and restore data. The secure preview feature makes it easy to identify the correct data that needs to be restored, eliminating multiple restore iterations.
• Versatile options suit user needs, from restoring terabytes of data to just a few objects.
• Secure by design, offering immutable cloud data backups using a blockchain-based algorithm. Data is encrypted at rest and during transit. SSO can be easily set up, allowing multi-factor authentication (MFA) to be added to a configured identity provider.
• Scalable to meet growing enterprise demands with unlimited retention to comply with regional, industry, or company policies. The solution can scale seamlessly across millions of users.
• Available data, storing four copies of the backups in at least two data centers within the same region, guaranteeing data sovereignty.
• Multi-Tenancy and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) offer designable flows.
• Fully auditable operations such as restores, downloads, GDPR compliance-support labels, and others are all recorded in an audit log.

Be Prepared for Recovery

For help ensuring you can always recover your Microsoft data, talk to an Arcserve technology partner. Click here to schedule a free Arcserve SaaS Backup demo.