While troubleshooting a support incident in an O365 tenant today, I discovered a confusing bug while working with a SharePoint site collection recycle bin in a Modern UI SharePoint site.
If you are using the Modern UI (instead of the Classic experience) while in the site collection recycle bin, you may not be seeing all of the files! Confused? Well I sure was.
I was tasked with restoring a large number of files accidentally deleted by a user who was unable to perform the restore for themselves. I knew there were ~700 files deleted by running an audit report from the Security & Compliance Center with the FileDeleted and FolderDeleted actions logged.
Being a site collection administrator, my first response was to sift thru the site collection recycle bin and restore the accidentally deleted files. The problem is I only could see about 10% of the ~700 files I was expecting. Needless to say, this stumped me for quite a while…hours actually.
Eventually I opened up a Service Request with Microsoft. Shortly after I shared my screen with the support engineer they noticed I was looking at the recycle bin using the new Modern UI. This is when he told me to “switch to the classic experience”. As soon as I did this, lo and behold I could see all 700 files!
This apparently is a known issue and Microsoft is working on a fix for it. I have full confidence this will happen however in the meantime please be advised to switch to the classic experience when working with the site collection recycle bin.
I’m not sure if this issue is related to a specific recycle bin scenario (i.e. volume, site collection versus end-user recycle bin) however I’m sharing this in case it saves someone else some time.
Happy Troubleshooting!
-JCK