Restoring a deleted Microsoft 365 group and its resources

A Microsoft 365 group is not one object. It is an Entra ID group with a mailbox, a SharePoint site, a Planner plan, and possibly a Team, a Viva Engage community, and a set of Loop workspaces hanging off it. When someone deletes the group — by accident, by an expiration policy nobody read the email about, or by removing the last owner in a script — all of those go with it. The good news is that restoring the group brings almost all of it back. The bad news is the clock.

The window: 30 days, no extensions

A deleted Microsoft 365 group is soft-deleted for 30 days. During that time it sits in Entra ID's deleted items and can be restored by any Global Administrator, Groups Administrator, or the group's former owner (from the Microsoft 365 admin center or Outlook). After 30 days the group is permanently deleted, and with it the mailbox, site contents, plan, and Team.

There is no setting to extend this window, and there is no Microsoft support process that reliably reaches past it. If you are inside the window, this is a five-minute job. If you are outside it, skip to the last section.

Confirm what you are restoring

Before restoring, find the group in the deleted list and check two things:

Is it the right one? Groups get created, deleted and recreated with the same display name. Check the deleted group's mail address and the deletion date, not just the name. Restoring the wrong one creates a second object with a mail nickname conflict.
Has someone already recreated it? If a helpful user has already made a new Team with the same name, restoring the old group works but you will now have two, and the old mail address will be taken by whichever one holds it. Decide which survives before restoring.

In PowerShell:

Get-MgDirectoryDeletedItemAsGroup -All | Select-Object DisplayName, Mail, DeletedDateTime, Id

Restore it

From the Entra admin center: Groups → Deleted groups → select → Restore group. From the Microsoft 365 admin center: Teams and groups → Deleted groups. Or:

Restore-MgDirectoryDeletedItem -DirectoryObjectId "group-object-id"

The group object itself is back within seconds. The rest follows on its own schedule.

What comes back, and how quickly

Entra group, members, owners — immediately.
Group mailbox and conversations — usually within minutes, occasionally longer while Exchange reconnects the mailbox.
SharePoint site and all files, versions and permissions — the site is restored from the SharePoint recycle bin as part of the group restore. Files are intact; sharing links remain valid.
Planner plan — restored with tasks and buckets.
Team — this is the one that tests people's patience. Microsoft documents that the Team can take up to 24 hours to reappear in the Teams client after the group is restored. Channels, tabs, chat history and files return with it. If it has not appeared after 24 hours, check whether the group's resourceProvisioningOptions still contains Team — if it does not, the Team was never linked and there is nothing to restore.
Viva Engage community — restored, if the group was a community.

Tell the requester at the moment of restore: "Files and mail are back now; the Team can take a day." That single sentence prevents most of the follow-up tickets.

What does not come back

Anything deleted from the group before the group was deleted. Restoring the group restores the SharePoint site as it was at deletion. Files someone emptied from the site recycle bin the week before are still gone.
Retention-policy-deleted content. If a Purview retention policy disposed of items during the deleted period, the disposal stands.
Guest access invitations that were in flight. Guests who had accepted are still members; pending invitations are lost.
Some app data. Third-party tabs and apps installed in the Team that store state on their own service may reconnect, or may not. That is on the app vendor.

After the window: what actually exists

Once the 30 days pass, the group and its mailbox are gone. Two things may still exist, and both are worth checking before telling anyone the content is unrecoverable:

The SharePoint site. The site collection has its own 93-day recycle-bin lifecycle in SharePoint, independent of the group's 30 days. Check SharePoint admin center → Deleted sites. If it is there, you can restore the site — but restoring a group-connected site whose group is permanently gone leaves you with an orphaned site. You can then create a new group and connect it, or simply treat the site as a standalone team site and give people permissions directly. Files, versions and permissions survive this route; conversations and the Team do not.

A backup. If you have Microsoft 365 Backup or a third-party product, this is exactly the scenario they sell against. Restore the site and the mailbox to the point before deletion; see Microsoft 365 backup and recovery for what each option can and cannot rehydrate.

Beyond those two, the honest answer is no. Microsoft support cannot restore a Microsoft 365 group past 30 days, and the mailbox content is not recoverable through eDiscovery once the mailbox itself is gone — with one exception: if a retention policy or hold covered the group mailbox at deletion, the mailbox is kept as an inactive mailbox for the policy's duration and the content is searchable in eDiscovery. That is a retention question, not a restore question, and it is why groups covered by retention behave differently from groups that were not.

Preventing the next one

Expiration policy with a real notification path. Group expiration is the single largest source of "who deleted our Team?" tickets. Owners get email; make sure the email is going to people who read it, and enable the activity-based renewal option so groups in use renew themselves.
Two owners minimum. Enforce it in your provisioning process. A group whose only owner leaves gets deleted by the offboarding script.
Retention on group mailboxes and sites if the content matters. It converts "permanently gone after 30 days" into "held for the retention period".
A deleted-groups check in your weekly admin routine. Thirty seconds looking at the list catches accidents while they are still fixable.