Restore a User in Office 365

Overview About Restore a User in Office 365

Office 365 being one of the best cloud based technology; provides numerous functionalities that helps the user to work & collaborate efficiently. In this blog we will discuss about one of the most searched queries regarding O365 or Exchange Online, which is how to restore a user in Office 365.

First of all, you should consider several things before you choose to delete a user’s mailbox from Office 365 or Exchange Online. There are different kinds of deletions (soft deletion & hard deletion), some of the deletions won’t let you to recover or reconnect the deleted user mailbox. Read More

In Exchange Online / O365 when you delete a mailbox, all the contents of the mailbox are retained for 30 days. After 30 days, the user mailbox is permanently deleted from Office 365 and cannot be restored. The procedure for recovering a mailbox depends on whether the user mailbox was deleted by removing the Exchange Online license or deleting the O365 user account.

Why does an Organization Restore a User in Office 365 or Microsoft 365?

Many business scenarios call for such a process to take place in an organization. Some of them are:

Deleted the wrong account. Admins are humans after all so mistakes can happen from their end as well. One common mistake is to remove the user account which they were not supposed to.
This is a common occurrence where there are people with the same name. That is why admins should rely on a unique identifier before moving ahead with the account removal. So that later they do not have to spend unnecessary time to restore a user in Office 365

Moreover, there is also a chance that an employee returns after wrongful termination or decides to stay after resignation. So when this happens admins must restore the access of that user to their account so that they can work as usual. If an admin did thier job by exporting Office 365 emails in PST file there there is a safety net available even if the restoration fails.

Issues with Office 365 Deleted Mailbox Retention

In this section, we will discuss about the issues / concerns of the users regarding how to restore a deleted user in Office 365. The following are some of the queries of users gathered from various forum or QA sites.

Things to Consider Before You Restore a User in Office 365

Let us now discuss about the things that are to be considered or kept in mind before you try to recover deleted mailbox in Office 365.

  • Verify if there are Office 365 licenses available that can assigned to the user account.
  • If your organization uses Active Directory (AD), you need to troubleshoot in a different manner in order to reconnect / reattach deleted user mailboxes in this case.

How to Restore a Deleted User in Office 365?

There are various scenarios that the users face while trying to fetch or get soft deleted mailbox in Office 365. Hence, there are several ways to recover deleted mailbox in Office 365 or Exchange Online.

In this section, we will discuss about the several procedures to restore a user in Office 365.

Scenario 1: Recover One or Multiple User Mailboxes

It is a must to have the admin permissions in Office 365 to reconnect deleted user mailbox in Exchange Online or O365.

  • Go to Users → Deleted users.
  • Select the names of the users that you want to recover, and then select Restore users or Restore (On the Deleted users page). You will receive any of the following screens:
  • In case the user mailbox is successfully restored, click on Close button in the confirmation box. But if you encounter a proxy address conflict or a name conflict, please follow the below-mentioned steps to know how to restore those accounts.
  • Note: After the restoration of user mailbox is complete, you must reset the password for that account.

Scenario 2: Restore a User in Office 365 that has a User Name Conflict

The user name conflict issue occurs when an administrator deletes or removes a user mailbox, then creates a new user mailbox with the same user name, and after that he tries to restore the deleted mailbox.

The resolution to this user name conflict is that you can either assign a unique user name to the user mailbox that you trying to reconnect or replace the active user mailbox with the one that you are trying to restore, so that there are no two mailboxes with the same name.

Steps to restore a mailbox that has a user name conflict:

In Classic Admin Center:

  • Go to Users → Deleted users.
  • Select the names of the users that you want to recover, and then select Restore users or Restore (On the Deleted users page).

    NOTE: If multiple user mailboxes fail to be restored, an error will inform you that the restore operation has failed for some mailboxes. View the report and see which mailboxes failed to be recovered, and then reconnect the failed mailboxes one by one.

  • On the User name conflict page, follow any one of the steps given below:

    – Choose Edit user name of the mailbox you want to recover, type a unique user name, then choose the appropriate domain name. (If you want to keep the recovered account and the active conflicting account)

    – If you want to remove the active account and replace it with the account that you are restoring, select Replace active user with this deleted user.

  • Then click on Submit.
  • Then choose Finish.

In Preview Admin Center:

  • Go to Users → Deleted users.
  • Select the names of the users that you want to recover, and then select Restore users or Restore (On the Deleted users page).

    NOTE: If multiple user mailboxes fail to be restored, an error will inform you that the restore operation has failed for some mailboxes. View the report and see which mailboxes failed to be recovered, and then reconnect the failed mailboxes one by one.

  • On the Restore page, choose to reset the password in any of the ways given in the page.
  • If you select “Let me create the password”, then you can type the password in the Password box, and retype the password to reset the password.
  • Click on Restore.
  • An error message will inform you that there was a problem reconnecting the mailbox. Perform any of the following steps to proceed further:

    – Cancel or Stop the restore process and rename the current active mailbox. Then attempt to recover again.

    – Enter a new primary email address for the mailbox and click on Restore.

  • Then click on Close.

Scenario 3: Reconnect a User Mailbox that has a Proxy Address Conflict

The proxy address conflict issue occurs when an administrator removes a user mailbox that has a proxy address, and assigns the same proxy address to some other mailbox, and tries to recover the removed mailbox. Perform the following steps to resolve this issue and successfully restore a user in Office 365.

Steps to restore a mailbox that has a proxy address conflict:

In Classic Admin Center:

  • Go to Users → Deleted users.
  • Select the names of the users that you want to recover, and then select Restore users or Restore (On the Deleted users page).

    NOTE: If multiple user mailboxes fail to be restored, an error will inform you that the restore operation has failed for some mailboxes. View the report and see which mailboxes failed to be recovered, and then reconnect the failed mailboxes one by one.

  • If you want to recover the user mailbox and remove the proxy address attached to that mailbox, choose Submit. (On the Restore User page)

    NOTE: If a user mailbox consists of more than one error message that doesn’t allow the restoration, the Resolve proxy address conflict page will display a “Next” button instead of displaying a “Submit” button. Click on the Next button to solve the error on the next page.

  • Then choose Finish.

In Preview Admin Center:

  • Go to Users → Deleted users.
  • Select the names of the users that you want to recover, and then select Restore users or Restore (On the Deleted users page).

    NOTE: If multiple user mailboxes fail to be restored, an error will inform you that the restore operation has failed for some mailboxes. View the report and see which mailboxes failed to be recovered, and then reconnect the failed mailboxes one by one.

  • On the Restore page, choose to reset the password in any of the ways given in the page.
  • If you select “Let me create the password”, then you can type the password in the Password box, and retype the password to reset the password.
  • Click on Restore. Any conflicting proxy address are removed automatically from the user mailboxes you are restoring.
  • Choose the Close option.

What to do if User Restoration Fails in Office 365?

Once the time limit is exceeded, there is no way to restore a user in Office 365 by any of the above methods. So the only option left for the admins is to create a new account. However, the problem with this is that the historical user data is lost for good. That means even when the user belonged to the organization before, they now have no access to their previous documents/ data and thus are essentially a brand new user.
This is not a problem where a user is shifted to a new role where there is no need for historical data. Nonetheless, the chance of this is slim to none as there are always instances where people who rejoin require access to the data that previously belonged to them. One way admins can prevent it from happening again is if they download multiple documents from Office 365 to Hard Drive beforehand.

Bypass the Need to Restore a User in Office 365

So next time if you are in a position where you would need to conduct user removal consider these alternatives. Archive the user instead: Microsoft 365 gives the admins the ability to put the users in an inactive state. By doing this an organization can save on licensing costs while also preserving the data for a longer duration. Convert the user’s mailbox into a shared mailbox: Create an offline backup for User data: This is perhaps the most useful of the practices that any admin should follow. Keeping a backup becomes quite easy if you use a

Conclusion

In this blog, we have discussed the issues that the users face while trying to restore a user in Office 365 or Exchange Online. The things that are to be kept in mind while trying to restore users and the various methods to reconnect deleted mailbox in Office 365 are also discussed in this blog. Discover manual methods to recover one or more user mailboxes when there is a user name conflict or a proxy address conflict.