Restore a recently deleted user


After you delete a user account, you have five days to restore it. After five days, the Admin console permanently deletes the user account, and it can't be restored, even if you contact Google technical support. In most cases, restoring a deleted user account restores the user's email, calendar events, and other data. However, Google doesn't guarantee full data recovery for deleted users.

Google Support can't restore user accounts that have been deleted for more than five days.

You can't restore a recently deleted user if:

  • The deleted account's username matches an existing group, username, or email alias that's been created in the meantime. If it does, you'll see a "username already exists" error message.
  • You don't have an available user license, in which case you'll see a "domain is over user limit" error message.

To restore a recently deleted user:

  1. Sign in to the Google Admin console.
  2. Click Users.
  3. Under Filters at the right of the user list, choose the Recently deleted users filter. If you don't see Filters, click Filter button.
  4. Check the box next to the user you want to restore. You can restore only one user at a time. If the user doesn't appear in this list, the account was permanently deleted and can no longer be restored.
  5. Click .
  6. If you have multiple organizational units, select the unit to which you want to assign the user.

The Admin console restores the account as suspended if the restored user's Drive data was transferred before the user was deleted, or if the user was suspended at the time the account was deleted. Otherwise, the user appears in the organization you specified when restoring the user.