

The first of these caveats is that the technique that I will show you will only work if the account was deleted recently. However, there are a couple of major caveats that you need to be aware of. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, however, it is possible to recover a deleted account using only the native Microsoft 365 tools. Restoring a backup that you have created yourself is the only 100 percent sure way of recovering a deleted account. The reason why I bring this up now is because even though it’s easy to think of Microsoft 365 data as consisting of things like files or email messages, the Microsoft 365 accounts themselves are actually a type of data.Īll of this is to say that organizations need to be backing up their Microsoft 365 ecosystems. Microsoft 365 subscribers are responsible for backing up their own data. The shared part of the shared responsibility model comes into play with regard to data. In other words, Microsoft keeps the various Microsoft 365 applications online and healthy. The basic idea behind this model is that Microsoft maintains responsibility for the cloud’s underlying infrastructure. Microsoft uses something that they call a shared responsibility model for the Microsoft 365 cloud. An important caveatīefore I show you how to recover a deleted account, there is something important that I need to explain.

However, the good news is that it is usually possible to recover a deleted account as long as you act quickly enough. More often, though, an admin will delete the account of someone who no longer works for the organization, only to be told that the account is needed. In one case, a panicked admin contacted me because they had accidentally deleted the wrong user account. Over the past couple of months, I have received an insane number of email messages from people who wanted to know if it is possible to restore a Microsoft 365 user account that has been deleted.
