Restore a Recently Deleted User

Introduction to Exercise

You can restore a recently deleted user account for up to 20 days. After this period, the Admin console permanently deletes the user account and it can't be recovered, even if you contact Google technical support.

In most cases, restoring a deleted user account also restores the user's associated data, however, Google doesn't guarantee full data recovery for a deleted user.

Important:

• You must have super administrator privileges to restore a recently deleted user.

• You can't restore a recently deleted user if the deleted username matches an existing group name, another active username, or another user's email alias. If it does, you'll see a username already exists error message.

• You can't exceed your maximum number of user licenses. If you try to restore a deleted user when you don't have an available license, you'll see a domain is over user limit error message.

Exercise Scenario

The next day you get a high priority email from Lars Ericsson:

Hello Cloud Identity Admin,

I'm afraid I was a little premature in getting you to delete our HR contractor Jon Baird. We've decided to extend his contract and hire him as a full-time employee.

Is there any way you can restore his user account?

Regards, Lars Ericsson

Exercise Directions

1. Sign into your Google Admin console as the administrator user using your administrator account name and password.

2. Click the Users icon.

3. In the Filters list (click the Filters button if you don't see this list), choose Recently deleted users in the User Type drop-down list.

Note: If you have multiple organizations in your domain, stay at the top-level organization—deleted users lose their organization details and are moved to the top-level organization.

4. Locate Jon Baird in the list and check the box next to his name.

If a deleted user's name isn't in this list, the account has been fully deleted and can no longer be restored.

5. Click Recover user to restore Jon's user account and choose the organization to place him.

Note: You can restore only one user at a time.

• If the account restore is successful, you may see a banner message similar to “User account restore has been initiated, please wait for 2 hours for complete restore of the account.”

• It may take some time for the user to be visible again in the user list.

• If a user was suspended at the time the account was deleted, such as when you transfer ownership of a user's files, the user will still be suspended after the account is restored.

6. In the Filters list, choose Suspended users in the User Type drop-down list.

7. Restore the suspension and put Jon Baird back in the Active users list:

• In the Suspended users list, find and click Jon's username.

• On Jon's user account page, click the exclamation point and select Reactivate. Jon should now be back on the Active users list.