Coauthor: Yichao Wu
Have you ever accidentally deleted something important? With Item recovery in Microsoft Fabric (Preview), you no longer need to worry. You can easily restore deleted items—whether it was a mistake or something unexpected—within a retention window you control.
The challenge: Item deletion is permanent
Previously, when a user deleted an item in a Fabric workspace—a lakehouse, a notebook, a pipeline—the item itself was deleted permanently. If the deletion was accidental, there was no undo. Fabric already supports workspace-level retention, but individual items within a workspace had no safety net. That gap is now closed.
What's new: Recovery for individual items
With Item recovery, when a user deletes a supported item in a workspace, the item isn't permanently deleted. Instead, it enters a soft-deleted state and remains recoverable for a configurable retention period of 7 to 90 days.
Deleted items are visible in the new Workspace recycle bin—a dedicated view within each workspace where users can browse, restore, or permanently delete items.
Figure: The Workspace recycle bin provides a dedicated view for managing deleted items, with options to restore or permanently delete.
Figure: Item restore using Workspace recycle bin.
During the retention period:
- Workspace Contributors, Members, and Admins can recover deleted items using the Workspace recycle bin in the Fabric portal or via the REST API.
- Workspace Admins can permanently delete soft-deleted items from the recycle bin or via the REST API.
- Tenant Admins can configure the retention period and manage settings centrally.
To learn more, refer to the supported item types documentation.
Why it matters
Accidental deletion protection
An analyst drops the wrong Lakehouse. A data engineer cleans up a workspace and removes a pipeline that’s still in production. These scenarios happen every day in busy enterprise environments with dozens of contributors sharing a workspace. Without item-level recovery, the only option was to recreate the item from scratch—assuming someone remembered its configuration, lineage, and contents.Item Recovery gives your team a safety net, turning a potential disaster into a quick, self-service recovery. Workspace contributors can restore deleted items themselves, without waiting for admin intervention.
Security investigation and forensics
Consider this scenario: a malicious insider creates a Notebook, uses it to exfiltrate data from a Lakehouse, and then deletes the Notebook to cover their tracks. Before Item Recovery, audit logs told you that a notebook was created and deleted—but the item’s actual contents were lost. You knew something happened, but you couldn’t inspect the evidence.Now, you can recover the deleted notebook, open it, and see exactly what code was executed. The full evidence is preserved—not just the audit trail, but the actual code, data references, and execution context. This capability helps close a critical gap in your forensic investigation workflow.
Compliance and governance
Regulatory frameworks increasingly require organizations to demonstrate data protection and recoverability. Item Recovery helps add a critical layer to your compliance posture, complementing workspace retention and audit logging. When auditors ask, “What happens when someone deletes a production asset?” you now have a concrete answer: for supported item types, items are retained, recoverable, and auditable throughout the retention window.Next steps
Item Recovery (Preview)—no sign-up required. Here’s how to get started:- Enable it now—Tenant administrators can turn on Item Recovery today in the admin portal under Tenant settings > Item Recovery. To learn more, refer to the retention and recovery documentation.
- Share your feedback— We'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment on this post with your thoughts, suggestions, or feature requests.