Restoring Deleted Files and Folders

The Restore Deleted Files and Folders feature allows Site Administrators to recover deleted content from a site. Use this feature to recover from deletions that break your workflows. Restore operations run in the background; they do not interrupt other activity on the site.

Deleted files remain available for restoration only within a configured retention window defined in the Retain backup copies of files after deletion setting. By default, deleted files are retained for 30 days. Deleted content older than the retention period cannot be recovered.

How Restores Work

Background processing of the restore begins after you submit the restore request. The submitted request shows information about the restore progress, final status, and errors. Completion time depends on the number of items, the volume of data, and the queue of other background jobs.

Choose whether to restore deleted content from a specific folder or across the entire site. To restore a particular file or subfolder, you must run the restore for a specific folder rather than sitewide.

Restored files can return to their original location, or you have the option to restore them to a new folder created under the root folder. The act of restoring a file is treated as moving the file, so a file cannot be restored to its original folder if another file with the same name already exists in the folder.

If you select the option to restore permissions, folder-level permissions that were deleted with the content are also restored when files are returned to their original location.

You can choose to keep the original Last Modified timestamps or set them to today's date to prevent immediate triggering of file expiration policies.

What Can Be Restored

Restores are only available for files and folders still within the retention window defined by the Retain backup copies of files after deletion setting. Files are eligible for restoration only once. Additional attempts to restore the same files will not succeed.

Items That Cannot Be Restored

Files.com does not support destructive file moves, and restoring a file is treated as a move operation. This means that files overwritten at the same path cannot be restored to their original folder.

Any file deleted before the defined retention window for its folder cannot be restored. This is because deleted items are permanently removed after the retention window has passed.

Folder settings are not restored when a deleted folder is restored. Check your settings changes logs for which folder settings were removed when the folder was removed.

Items deleted from a Remote Server cannot be restored by Files.com.

Deleted Files on Remote Servers

Data stored on Remote Servers are under the control of those storage vendors. Deleted files on Remote Servers cannot be restored by Files.com.

For remote providers that support versioning, Files.com offers the ability to browse and restore Remote Server content using point-in-time filtering, which allows you to view and recover files as they existed at a specific moment in the past.

Some of the cloud-based storage solutions support restoring deleted files. Contact the owner, or vendor, of the Remote Server to find out what options they provide for restoring deleted files.