A Complete Guide to Recover a G Suite User’s Gmail and G Drive Data

  author
Rollins Duke   
Published: June 3rd, 2022 • 4 Min Read

Recover a G Suite User’s Gmail and G Drive Data: Gmail, from the house of Google, is one of the services that have proved to be a milestone in its success. It is a hosted service, which allows users to access emails and their attachments. Be it for personal use or professional, users worldwide deploy Gmail for their day-to-day communication purpose. However, the only factor, which proves to be worrisome, is the loopholes in cloud services that sometimes result in the loss of Gmail data.

The biggest challenge faced by Gmail users is the failure in the recovery of valuable data loss that can occur due to unintentional deletion or disruption in the service from Google’s end. In the recent past Google, outages have led to the permanent deletion of Gmail data, thus giving rise to the need for recovering a G Suite user’s Gmail and G Drive data. At times, the user might intentionally delete some emails, which he may require at some other point in time. In addition to this, some users end up deleting some emails accidentally.

In such instances, it becomes necessary to recover a G Suite user’s Gmail and G Drive data and proceed with the other tasks. However, there are scenarios in which doing so is not as easy as it seems. This write-up will help you to be acquainted with the different scenarios of data deletion from G Suite and the perfect solutions to backup G Suite Users’ Gmail and G drive data.

Types of Data Deletion in G Suite

Data deletion in G Suite is categorized into two categories:

  1. Soft Deletion –  When the user deletes data from Gmail by clicking on the delete option, the process is known as soft deletion. Once soft deleted, the email data are stored in the Trash folder.
  2. Hard Deletion – When the emails are permanently deleted from Gmail, it is referred to as hard deletion. If the user deletes emails by pressing, Shift + Delete together or by deleting the emails from the Trash folder, the emails are permanently deleted from Gmail.

Recover a G Suite User’s Gmail and G Drive Data

Since the soft deletion and hard deletion vary, the methods by which the emails can be recovered are also diverse. Let us have a look at the methods:

For Soft Deletion

The soft deletion of emails can be recovered by simply going to the Trash folder and moving the deleted email back to its original folder, from which it was deleted. When the user deletes the data, it stays in the Trash folder for 30 days. During 30 days duration, users can easily retrieve their messages by following the mentioned steps:

  • Open Gmail on your system.
  • Click on the More option and click on the Trash folder, which is there in the left panel.
  • Check the box, which is there next to messages that are needed to move.
  • Select Move to option >> select the location where the messages are required to be moved such as Inbox.

For Hard Deletion

The Hard Deleted emails are permanently deletion of data and can be only recovered from the Administrative Console. However, users can recover the messages, which are permanently deleted from the user’s Trash within 25 days of deletion. After 25 days, the data is deleted forever. Some steps are required to be followed to recover a G Suite user’s Gmail and G Drive data the data as mentioned:

Restore One User’s Data

  • Firstly, sign in to the Admin Console of Google (by using an administrator account).
  • Go to users from the dashboard of the Admin Console.
  • Find the users and select their names for viewing the account page.
  • Click on more and restore data from the user’s account page.
  • Choose the date range that is required to be retrieved within the last 25 days.
  • Choose data type to be restored, i.e. Drive or Gmail >> Restore data.

Restore For Several Users

  • Login to Google Admin Console.
  • Click on the user’s option from the Admin Console dashboard.
  • Choose the data that is needed to be restored.

Note: The administrator can select up to 10 users only at a time.

  • Choose more option from toolbar >> restore data.
  • Select the date range to restore the data within the last 25 days.
  • Choose Drive or Gmail to restore data.
  • Select Restore data.

Note: Data cannot be restored from the spam folder and Google Map Files cannot be restored.

Conclusion

Emails constitute to be the most important part of communication. When it comes to the organizational level, it becomes important to recover a G Suite User’s Gmail and G Drive data. In the above discussion, we have discussed the way to retrieve the complete data.