Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365: when deleted data is gone

Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 can both undo a deletion, but only for a few weeks, and the deadlines differ by what was deleted. A Gmail message or Drive file purged from the trash can be restored by an admin for 25 days. A SharePoint or OneDrive file stays in its recycle bins for 93 days. A deleted user account lasts 20 days at Google and 30 at Microsoft.

After that the data is gone, and nothing in either vendor’s terms promises to bring it back. If your company runs on either suite, this decides whether one bad click, a departing employee or a rogue script costs you an afternoon or the data itself. We read the current help pages and data terms of both vendors on October 23, 2026. Then we put every window in one table and wrote a short script that turns a deletion date into deadlines.

The vendors keep your data safe from their failures, not from yours

A restore is rarely about the vendor’s hardware. The everyday cases are a person deleting a folder, an admin removing the wrong account or a sync tool overwriting files. As far as the service can tell, those deletions are correct.

Microsoft states the split in its shared responsibility model. For software as a service such as Microsoft 365, the rows “Customer data”, “Configurations and settings” and “Identities and users” all read “Customer”. Its business Data Protection Addendum (May 2026) promises that “Customer will have the ability to access, extract and delete Customer Data” during the subscription. It promises nothing about getting deleted data back.

Google’s Cloud Data Processing Addendum, which covers Workspace, goes further in section 6.1. It covers data the customer deletes “and that Customer Data cannot be recovered by Customer.” That use “will constitute an Instruction to Google to delete the relevant Customer Data from Google’s systems.”

In plain terms: once the restore window closes, Google treats the deletion as your order, and it then erases the data within at most 180 days. That is a deletion deadline for Google, not a recovery option for you.

The money at stake is capped too. Google’s Workspace terms, last modified October 12, 2026, limit each party’s total liability to the fees paid in the 12 months before the event (section 12.2). We worked through what an outage earns in SLA credits; for lost data, neither contract we read promises a restore at all.

The windows, side by side

These are the documented defaults on October 23, 2026, from each vendor’s admin and support pages. “Days” counts from the moment of deletion unless the row says otherwise.

What was deleted	Google Workspace	Microsoft 365
File, left in trash or recycle bin	30 days in Drive trash, then the admin window below	93 days in total across both recycle bins
File, trash emptied by the user	Admin can restore for 25 days after the trash is emptied	Still in the second-stage recycle bin until day 93
Email, left in trash	30 days in Gmail trash, then 25 more for an admin	Stays in Deleted Items until emptied
Email, purged by the user	Admin can restore for 25 days	User can recover for 14 days, up to 30 if an admin raises it
User account	20 days, super admin only	30 days, mailbox included
Deleted user’s files	Restorable within the same 20 days	OneDrive kept 30 days by default, then 93 more in the recycle bin
Site or shared space	Not compared here	SharePoint site 93 days; its Microsoft 365 group’s other resources 30
Whole subscription ends	Up to 30 days’ recovery period, then deletion within 180 (DPA 6.2)	90 days in a limited-function account to extract data, then deletion within 90 more (DPA)

Three gaps stand out. Microsoft keeps files more than three times as long as Google once someone empties a trash (93 days against 25). Google keeps purged email longer by default (25 days against 14). And Microsoft’s slowest path is the one that matters most when someone leaves: their OneDrive can outlive their account by months.

Google’s admin restore takes a date range; Microsoft’s bins work per item

Length is only half the story. For Gmail, Google’s admin restore works on a user and a date range, not on chosen messages. The admin picks a range “from within the last 25 days,” and once started, “the restore process can’t be stopped or paused,” according to Google’s Gmail restore page. That page lists what cannot come back: messages deleted from spam, deleted drafts, deleted labels and their nesting, and data still in the user’s trash.

The Drive version adds a storage condition. Google’s Drive restore page says a restore cannot push the user or the organization past its storage limit; if space runs out, the restore stops.

Microsoft’s recycle bins work per item, and users can do most of it themselves. Exchange users get Recover Deleted Items in Outlook without calling the help desk. OneDrive adds Restore your OneDrive, which rolls a whole OneDrive back to a point in the last 30 days. It is the closest thing we found in either suite to an undo button for mass damage, such as a sync tool overwriting hundreds of files.

The catch on Microsoft’s side sits in the edge cases. Shift+Delete on a user-created folder in Outlook hard deletes the folder itself. Microsoft’s page says it “can’t be recovered even if the mailbox is placed on litigation hold”; only the items inside it go to Recoverable Items for the 14 days.

The Recoverable Items folder also has its own quota, a 20 GB warning level and a 30 GB limit by default. Once a mailbox reaches the warning level, the oldest deleted items are purged first, even before the 14 days are up.

Departing employees meet the shortest window

A hypothetical but familiar sequence: someone leaves, IT deletes the account to free the license, and two months later a manager asks for a contract that lived in that person’s files. At Google the answer is no after 20 days: the restore page says the data is permanently gone. A restore also fails if no license is free, if another account or group took the username, or if the domain moved.

At Microsoft the account is gone after 30 days, but the OneDrive follows a slower track. By default, Microsoft’s OneDrive deletion process gives the deleted user’s manager access, emails them, and keeps the OneDrive for 30 days. Then it moves to the site collection recycle bin “where it’s kept for 93 days,” restorable only with PowerShell. Admins can set the first period anywhere from 30 to 3,650 days.

There is a cost hidden in that long setting. The same Microsoft page says OneDrive accounts without a valid license “are automatically archived on their 93rd unlicensed day,” in what it calls a paid archive state. Microsoft adds that after 12 months of unpaid archive, the data might be deleted regardless of retention settings. A long retention works, but it is not free indefinitely.

Neither suite’s compliance tool fills the gap as a backup. Google says plainly that “Vault isn’t a data archive” on its Vault overview. Its Gmail and Drive restore pages add that data Vault retained cannot be restored directly into the user’s account, so you export it and bring it back by hand. Microsoft’s retention policies take precedence over the OneDrive deletion process, so they can keep content longer, but that is preservation for legal reasons, not a one-click restore.

Atlassian showed what a vendor-side restore looks like

Restoring at scale is hard even for the vendor. On April 5, 2022, a maintenance script at Atlassian deleted 883 cloud sites belonging to 775 customers, according to Atlassian’s own post-incident review. The script had been given site IDs instead of app IDs.

Atlassian kept 30 days of backups, and no customer lost more than five minutes of data. But it had not automated “restoring a large subset of customers” into its live environment. Sites came back one by one, and the outage lasted up to 14 days for some customers. The data could come back because the deletion was Atlassian’s own and its backups covered it.

The lesson for a Workspace or Microsoft 365 customer runs the other way. When the deletion is yours, the vendor’s backups are not yours to call on. Your recovery is whatever the windows above allow, plus whatever copy you keep yourself. We made the same point about scripts that fail silently: GitLab learned its backups were empty only when it needed them.

A script that turns a deletion date into deadlines

When something is deleted, the first useful question is how many days you have. We wrote this Python script (standard library only) from the table above and ran it on October 23, 2026, with Python 3.11:

import sys
from datetime import date, timedelta

# (vendor, what was deleted, who restores, days from deletion, note)
WINDOWS = [
    ("Google", "Drive file, trash emptied at once", "admin", 25, "Admin console > Restore data"),
    ("Google", "Drive file, left in trash", "user, then admin", 30 + 25, "30 days in trash, then 25 (our reading)"),
    ("Google", "Gmail message, purged at once", "admin", 25, "Restore data; no spam, drafts or labels"),
    ("Google", "Gmail message, left in trash", "user, then admin", 30 + 25, "documented as 30 + 25"),
    ("Google", "User account (mail, Drive, all)", "super admin", 20, "needs a free license"),
    ("Microsoft", "SharePoint or OneDrive file", "user, then site admin", 93, "both recycle bins together"),
    ("Microsoft", "Email, emptied from Deleted Items", "user", 14, "raise to 30 per mailbox"),
    ("Microsoft", "User account and mailbox", "admin", 30, "Deleted users page"),
    ("Microsoft", "Deleted user's OneDrive", "admin (PowerShell)", 30 + 93, "30-day retention, then 93 in recycle bin"),
    ("Microsoft", "SharePoint site", "SharePoint admin", 93, "group mail and files: 30"),
]


def deadlines(deleted, days_since=None):
    if days_since is not None and days_since < 0:
        raise ValueError("days since deletion cannot be negative")
    rows = []
    for vendor, what, who, days, note in WINDOWS:
        last = deleted + timedelta(days=days)
        status = ""
        if days_since is not None:
            left = days - days_since
            status = f"{left} days left" if left >= 0 else "gone"
        rows.append((vendor, what, who, days, last.isoformat(), status, note))
    return rows


if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) < 2:
        sys.exit("usage: python3 restore_deadlines.py YYYY-MM-DD [days-since-deletion]")
    try:
        deleted = date.fromisoformat(sys.argv[1])
        since = int(sys.argv[2]) if len(sys.argv) > 2 else None
        rows = deadlines(deleted, since)
    except ValueError as err:
        sys.exit(f"error: {err}")
    for r in rows:
        print(" | ".join(str(c) for c in r))

A sample run, for a deletion on November 2, 2026 that someone notices 21 days later, python3 restore_deadlines.py 2026-11-02 21:

Google | Drive file, trash emptied at once | admin | 25 | 2026-11-27 | 4 days left | Admin console > Restore data
Google | Drive file, left in trash | user, then admin | 55 | 2026-12-27 | 34 days left | 30 days in trash, then 25 (our reading)
Google | Gmail message, purged at once | admin | 25 | 2026-11-27 | 4 days left | Restore data; no spam, drafts or labels
Google | Gmail message, left in trash | user, then admin | 55 | 2026-12-27 | 34 days left | documented as 30 + 25
Google | User account (mail, Drive, all) | super admin | 20 | 2026-11-22 | gone | needs a free license
Microsoft | SharePoint or OneDrive file | user, then site admin | 93 | 2027-02-03 | 72 days left | both recycle bins together
Microsoft | Email, emptied from Deleted Items | user | 14 | 2026-11-16 | gone | raise to 30 per mailbox
Microsoft | User account and mailbox | admin | 30 | 2026-12-02 | 9 days left | Deleted users page
Microsoft | Deleted user's OneDrive | admin (PowerShell) | 123 | 2027-03-05 | 102 days left | 30-day retention, then 93 in recycle bin
Microsoft | SharePoint site | SharePoint admin | 93 | 2027-02-03 | 72 days left | group mail and files: 30

Three weeks in, a deleted Google account and a purged Outlook message are already gone, while every Microsoft file path still has more than two months. We also ran it with a negative day count, an impossible date (February 30) and a non-number; each exits with an error message instead of a wrong table.

Two limits apply. The script counts calendar days in UTC, and neither vendor says at what hour a window closes, so treat each date as a deadline to beat.

The row for a Drive file left in the trash is our reading. Google’s Drive page states 30 days in the trash and 25 days after the trash is emptied. Unlike its Gmail page, it does not spell out that the automatic purge on day 30 starts the same 25-day clock.

What this means for you

The decision is whether the native windows are enough for your worst realistic case, such as a deletion nobody notices for a month. Four steps cost nothing up front:

• Raise Exchange’s deleted-item retention to the maximum. Run this in Exchange Online PowerShell: Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter "RecipientTypeDetails -eq 'UserMailbox'" | Set-Mailbox -RetainDeletedItemsFor 30. It moves every existing mailbox from 14 to 30 days. Microsoft’s page notes it does not apply to mailboxes created later; those need a mailbox plan.
• Raise the OneDrive retention for deleted users. SharePoint admin center, Settings, Retention, “Days to retain files a deleted user’s OneDrive”, any value from 30 to 3,650. Past 93 unlicensed days the OneDrive moves to the paid archive, so weigh that before picking a long period.
• In Google Workspace, do not delete a departing user until their files have a new owner. The 20-day window is the shortest in the table. A restore also needs a free license.
• Write the deadline down the day something is lost. Run the script, or count from the table, and start the restore before the earliest date rather than the latest.

If a month is not enough, you need a copy outside the windows.

Microsoft sells one: Microsoft 365 Backup costs $0.15 per GB per month of protected content, billed through Azure as pay-as-you-go. By our math, 500 GB of mailboxes and sites comes to $75 a month, before deleted and versioned items, which Microsoft also counts. Deleted content stays billed until it expires from the backup, for example 365 days after it was taken. We did not price third-party backup services for either suite.

The trade-off is plain. A backup costs money every month and needs someone to test a restore now and then. Atlassian tested its backups regularly and still needed days to bring them back at scale. Without one, your recovery plan is a calendar: 20 days for a Google account, 25 for a purged Google file, 93 for a Microsoft one.

How we made this

On October 23, 2026, we read both vendors’ admin pages on deletion and restore, their data terms (Microsoft’s as a Word download) and Atlassian’s 2022 post-incident review. We wrote the deadline script from those pages and ran it that day on a sample deletion date and three bad inputs, not on a real incident. We did not delete or restore anything in a real Workspace or Microsoft 365 tenant, and we did not test third-party backup tools.

Sources

• Google, Recover deleted files and folders for Drive users, last updated October 22, 2026
• Google, Restore a user’s permanently deleted email, last updated October 22, 2026
• Google, Restore a recently deleted user
• Google, Delete or restore files in Google Drive
• Google, Google Vault overview, last updated October 22, 2026
• Google, Cloud Data Processing Addendum, sections 6.1 and 6.2
• Google, Google Workspace terms of service, last modified October 12, 2026, section 12.2
• Microsoft, Restore items or files from the SharePoint recycle bin
• Microsoft, Restore your OneDrive
• Microsoft, Recoverable Items folder in Exchange Online and Change how long permanently deleted items are kept
• Microsoft, Restore a user
• Microsoft, OneDrive retention and deletion and Set the OneDrive retention for deleted users
• Microsoft, Restore deleted sites
• Microsoft, Products and Services Data Protection Addendum, May 2026, “Data Retention and Deletion”
• Microsoft, Shared responsibility in the cloud
• Microsoft, Pricing model for Microsoft 365 Backup
• Atlassian, Post-incident review on the April 2022 outage
• 28creation calculation, October 23, 2026: the script above, run on a sample deletion date