How to Recover/ Restore Deleted Contacts in Office 365

Introduction

In the present scenario, Microsoft Office 365 is a cloud-dependent application that is used by millions of users. Office 365 renders tools and various services that helps the users to access their necessary documents, emails from anywhere in the entire world. The O365 suite has increased in demand as the users who are looking for a business collaboration suite prefer it over any other application.

The most commonly used application of this collaboration/ connectivity suite is OWA (or 365). OWA is a service which is mainly used to send or receive emails. Apart from this web-based version, which is OWA; Office 365 mailboxes can be easily accessed through 2016 as well; It allows the O365 account to be accessed on MAC, Windows, and iOS based platforms. Frequently, users face issues where they want to restore deleted contacts in Office 365. There are multiple forums overloaded with such user queries. Let us discuss in detail about how to recover deleted contacts in Office 365.

Need to Restore Deleted Contacts in Office 365

While accessing emails from O365 account, it is necessary to backup the contacts along with the emails. Sometimes, it is required to maintain the contacts for future purpose. This way a user will be able to easily access their erased contacts from Office 365. This allows the users to have access to the important data without any circumstances.

Frequently Office 365 users face certain issues while accessing the important data like contacts, emails, etc. In the following section, the user concerns based on unable to retrieve removed contacts in Office 365 are discussed:

"I am trying to maintain a copy of my contacts on my local drive but the problem is that I require to get the erased contacts as well. Can someone please suggest me a way to restore deleted contacts in Office 365."

"Being a non-techie user, I somehow erased some of my mailbox items last night. I want to recover those items ASAP. The items that I urgently need to fetch are my contacts and appointments. Please help me to do so."

How to Recover Deleted Contacts in Office 365?

One can easily retrieve the erased contacts from O365 account by following a simple approach. The following procedure need to be performed to fetch/ regain the deleted contacts from OWA:

For 2016

• Recover a contact that’s still present in Deleted Items folder

When a user removes a contact, it’s moves to deleted items folder in the mailbox. The following steps to fetch/ retrieve it:

1. Launch 2016, go to email folder and click the Deleted Items.
   
   
   
   
2. Now, use "Search Deleted Items" tab to find out the items that a user want to recover. Then select "Sorted by Icon" to group all contacts in this folder.
   
   
   
   
3. While finding the contacts, double-click on it and click on Move → Other Folder
   
   
   
   
4. To move the contacts back to a user contact list, select contacts and click ok.
   
   
   
   

• Recover a Contact that’s No Longer in Deleted Items Folder

1. In 2016, select email folder and click Deleted Items.
2. Select Home and click on Recover Deleted Items From Server.
   
   
   
   
3. To find a specific contact from Recover Deleted Items Window, click Subject column to sort the items by that column. and Look for blank values in From column.
   
   
   
   
4. Now, select the contact that a user wants to retrieve, press Restore Selected Items, and click OK option.
   
   

For OWA

OWA allows modification or deletion of the contact list that has created or imported into OWA. A user can recover a deleted contact list within 30 days of deletion. When a user tries to get/ retrieve a contact list, automatically the contacts are restored back to the People/ my contacts folder.

1. Under the navigation, click on Manage and then, choose Restore deleted contacts.
   
2. From recover deleted items Window, check the selected box of each contact list as a user want to restore.
   
3. At the bottom of Recover deleted items window, click on Recover.
   
4. Now, click OK button from the Recover items text box.
   

Limitation of Manual Method

The manual procedures described above have some limitations which makes it a less convenient method to restore deleted contacts in Office 365. As this procedure is quite lengthy so it becomes time-consuming from the users point of view. Then if the contacts are permanently deleted then they cannot be fetched/ recovered manually. Therefore, to avoid or overcome such problems a user can go for any available third party tool that can easily retrieve all your deleted contacts in an easier way.

CONCLUSION

In this blog, all the best-possible procedures to get/ restore deleted contacts in Office 365 are discussed. By performing above-mentioned workarounds, users will be able to retrieve the removed/ erased contacts from O365 with the help of the manual approaches.