Make it easier to search for files in the recycle bin. Right now there is no way to search the recycle bin other than scrolling down.
There is currently no way to efficiently search the recycle bin. The only option is to just scroll down. If you have a large amount of files in the recycle bin like I do, it is sometimes next to impossible to restore the file I am looking for. Another thing is you cannot open folders that are in the recycle bin. So if I am looking for a file in a folder I have to restore the whole folder to get to the file.

We’re thinking about this for our future planning but don’t have specifics to share yet.
59 comments
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wf commented
wasted way more time looking for a file scrolling than it will take you to develop a 'search' button. cant believe its taking you years to take action..
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Jitse commented
Please finally add this. Make this PRIORITY. At least give us the ability to sort by date.
Currently you have to scroll for hours looking for the files you deleted. I''m finding everything but I have been scrolling for 2 hours now and it's all mixed up.You have a great product here but not having this stuff is just ********. Onedrive is my number one cloudservice, a leap from dropbox due to them not having selective sync... Make this please...
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Anonymous commented
Seriously??? This is STILL not possible??
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Robert Murphy commented
Just saw other users comments, they seem to have gone through the same ****. I think its a disgrace to market onedrive as a safe place to store files as you can always recover files. Yes you can if you had a terrabyte of RAM as you scroll through the list.
For Documents its great but if you store your photos on there and have a mishap, they are gone.
Oh and when you view online it feels like a clunky old sharepoint site, running on a pc.
Microsoft should know better, they have pioneered some amazing things like .net. But the backend which you get closer to by viewing online is truly awful.
How hard would it be to have grouping function? Or would sharepoint not allow that!
Dont mean to rant, just my entire photo library loss was devastating.
Please make it better! :)
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Robert Murphy commented
You really should develop it, its a complete nightmare. I lost about 10,000 photos that meant so much to me. They were scattered in what seemed like an infinite list mixed with 1000s of files I deleted on purpose, source code for android for example!!
I like one drive, but it is ESSENTIAL that you use windows file history if you have win 10 because that would have helped me.
Not only that but as you page down chrome grinds to a halt as memory baloons!
To be honest it's not like Microsoft to not make recovery simpler :(
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[Deleted User] commented
For the love of god please allow us to search the recycle bin. I backed up and then deleted my sister's iTunes folder, several gigabytes, and now all I can see in the recycle bin is each individual file. I'm going to have to scroll for hours in order to find the top level folder and restore it. This is nuts!
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Anonymous commented
Absolutely shocking to see this - especially with the number of frustrated users across a perod of YEARS.
Why on Earth would you not be able to sort by (as a bare minumum) file size, file name, date of deletion etc.
I deleted a batch of files that should be easy to instantaneously restore... but instead, without rhyme or reason, I have to scroll through hundreds of thousands of files and try to identify the missing ones, so as to restore.
Atrocious lack of thinking and lack of response from Microsoft.
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Anonymous commented
Accidentally deleted a file while also deleting some unnecessary project files. After scrolling down the recycle bin for 10min i reached the file with name "0bf2bc....."
The file i want to recover starts with "e"... there is no chance for me to recover this file now even though i know it's in the recycle bin. -
Tiago Derevko commented
Honestly, I need to rescue a folder from Recycle bin and it is unacceptable to see that I can't easily find this particular folder in Recycle bin. I will have to spend hours of my life trying to recover this folder because Microsoft hasn't implemented such a basic feature on Onedrive. Or I might recover from my external backup, which will definitely be easier. As it's a request from 2015 and we are in 2020, I don't think you will be adding this feature. Small things like this make your customers run away.
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annoyed beyond all reason commented
Not sure if this helps, but if you know what PC the file was originally hosted on it seems that one drive places deleted files in the local recycle bin which is searchable. There is still 0 excuse for Microsoft to suck so bad at their OS's centerpiece cloud service.
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annoyed beyond all reason commented
MICROSOFT WTF DO YOU DO ALL DAY!!! This is idiot level garbage service. I HATE ONEDRIVE. Why bother implementing functional search! You can't compete with google drive, one drive, any other cloud storage. HOLY **** How much of my life force do you insist of wasting!
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josh commented
GARBAGE SERVICE. MAKE THIS USEABLE. Same issue. Deleted a high level folder and can't restore it
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Anonymous commented
I deleted a high level folder with many thousands of files. I am going to be scrolling until the end of the century before I can find the ones I need to undelete. I can't just restore all items as that would overwrite another set of folders with highly dynamic content. I can't even sort by "Date Deleted"
I also note that despite my region settings all being DD-MM-YYYY, the recycle bin has US date format MM-DD-YYYY.
How is this different from me being able to search my Gmail recycle bin? Other than none of the above being broken?
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David commented
this is the most rediculous thing. make it searchable
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Anonymous commented
It would be super helpful to be able to search recycle bin for a specific file.
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Frank commented
Thinking about this? It's 2020. Get bent. I have hundreds of thousands of files blocking the way of retrieving a deleted file. A simple search and I could restore. I'm cancelling and no longer recommending OneDrive. This is ludicrous. It's 2020!!!
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Fabian Linnebacer commented
That they're thinking about it seems nice, but does not help anyway. We have a huge Amount of files (about 180k) and someone in our organization made mistakes in a specific folder. Acually we need to scroll through everything in our recycle to find it manually... Altough they have a column "origin location".... We just need to filter for that location...
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Anonymous commented
Is the OneDrive Recycle Bin based on Windows or Unix? If it is based on Windows I can understand why it is not searchable, but if based on Unix, there is no excuse. Any good cloud storage offers full-text indexing and search capabilities. Please get this working soon. Five years with an opaque recycle bin is long enough. It is not even browseable by size or file type trees. It is a flat list. How lame.
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Haris Ballis commented
Don't wonder why people don't like OneDrive. I hate being the one complaining but this functionality is essential. It's been 5 years since the original post and you are still thinking about it? Like it's not a a good idea?
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Anonymous commented
This is crazy and unprofessional, how come you can offer a service like a cloud storage and we cannot search in the recycle bin? days ago i deleted few files and i cannot find them...c'mon be serious.