Can Microsoft recover a deleted OneDrive for Business site after a new empty OneDrive was provisioned?

Hi @Johannes Jönsson,

From what you've described, this doesn't appear to be a typical deleted-site recovery scenario that can be resolved through the standard SharePoint administrator restore process.

Because the Microsoft Entra ID user account was never deleted, removing the license that included OneDrive would normally place the existing OneDrive into the unlicensed account lifecycle rather than the deleted user lifecycle. Based on Microsoft's documented behavior, an unlicensed OneDrive becomes read-only after 60 days and is archived after 93 days. If the same user object is later assigned a valid license that includes OneDrive, the archived OneDrive would generally be expected to reactivate automatically, although service-side propagation can sometimes take up to 24-48 hours.

What stands out in your case is that the user appears to have been provisioned with a new, empty OneDrive that has a different Site ID. That is not the behavior we would normally expect during a standard reactivation process. Instead, it suggests that the service may not have reconnected the user to the original OneDrive site. This may indicate an issue related to site ownership mapping, identity synchronization, OneDrive provisioning, or a mismatch between the user's account identity and the original OneDrive site.

For that reason, I would recommend verifying whether the user's Entra Object ID has remained unchanged throughout the entire timeline. This is particularly important if the account was ever soft-deleted and restored, temporarily removed from synchronization scope, recreated, or otherwise modified while retaining the same UPN. Microsoft has documented scenarios where identity mismatches can result in a user being assigned a new OneDrive rather than being reconnected to an existing one.

You also mentioned that the following command returns no deleted personal sites: Get-SPODeletedSite -IncludePersonalSite -Limit All

That tells me the original OneDrive is not currently present in the SharePoint deleted-site recycle bin, meaning it cannot be restored through the standard administrator method using Restore-SPODeletedSite.

However, I would be cautious about interpreting that result as proof that the original data has already been permanently removed. An archived OneDrive associated with an unlicensed account is not necessarily represented as a deleted site, so its absence from the deleted-site list does not automatically rule out the possibility that the service still retains references to the original content.

The OneDrive Usage report is also an important piece of information because it confirms the original Site ID and shows the historical file count and storage usage associated with that site. That said, I would view it as historical evidence rather than confirmation that the underlying files are still recoverable. Usage reports can continue to display historical information for a period of time even when the current state of the site is no longer obvious from the administrator side.

At this point, I am not aware of any additional supported administrator-side recovery method that would allow you to investigate further.

My recommendation would be to open a Microsoft 365 support case and ask the SharePoint Online or OneDrive team to investigate the original Site ID.

Microsoft Support can review the service-side state of the original site and, if necessary, escalate the case to the appropriate engineering team. This investigation should help determine whether the original OneDrive still exists in an archived or otherwise inaccessible state, whether an identity or owner-mapping mismatch occurred, whether the site can be re-associated with the user account, and whether any supported recovery or reactivation option remains available.

While recovery unfortunately cannot be guaranteed if the original content has already been permanently removed from the service, the timeline you've provided and the fact that the Entra user account reportedly was never deleted make the provisioning of a completely new empty OneDrive look unusual. In my opinion, that provides a reasonable basis for escalation to Microsoft Support as a potential OneDrive lifecycle, provisioning, or identity-mapping issue.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my observations. I wish you the very best with the investigation, and I hope Microsoft Support can help clarify what happened and determine whether recovery remains possible.