This morning, I was looking for a specific tenant setting in the Fabric admin portal. While scrolling through a few of the tenant settings, I came across a specific one, which I like to elaborate on a bit more in detail, given I recently also had some questions around this topic from customers.

What happens if you delete a Fabric workspace? Is there a way to recover? How and for how long? Well, we now have a tenant setting to control this!

Deleted workspaces

For various reasons, you could end up on a situation where a workspace is deleted by a user, accidentally or on purpose. However, it could very well be that after a while people figure out that they actually needed something that was stored in that workspace, or it was deleted accidentally.

My usual first response would be: I hope you have your solution code stored properly in git, so you can easily redeploy the solution. Often this is not the case though, where people from a Power BI background often not adopted the git integration on workspaces. Also, not all Fabric items are supported yet, due to which you cannot recover your entire solution. Next to the solution items, workspace permissions and specific settings are not covered in the git repository, so a full recovery of the solution is not possible through git. So, what other alternatives do you have?

Admins to the rescue!

Fabric and Power BI Administrators can help you recover your workspaces in case they are deleted. We can talk about a “soft-deletion” of workspaces, given they are made invisible to users, but they are not gone yet!

In case workspaces are deleted (accidental or on purpose), the admin can recover the workspace from the admin portal. This has always been the case with Power BI, but obviously also apply to any Fabric workspace given they share the same setup. From the workspace menu in the admin portal, they can easily browse through all the workspaces on tenant level. Each workspace is listed there, despite the state of the workspace (active / deleted / orphaned / … ).

By default, workspaces will be deleted permanently after 7 days. Within these 7 days, Fabric Administrators can restore the workspace via the 3-dot menu, or permanently delete immediately. Though, before I mentioned that saving your solution in git will allow you to redeploy your solution, but it does not recover workspace permissions and other workspace settings. Good to mention, recovering a workspace from the admin portal also does not recover workspace permissions. During recovering, the admin has to specify the new admins for the workspace.

Retention

By default, the retention for workspaces is set to 7 days as mentioned before. Personally, I think that is limited but overall fine. Especially as people will often figure out in a short while when they accidentally removed it. However, in some cases workspaces might not be used on daily bases, but on monthly for example. People might only figure out after a while that the workspace they were looking for, is no longer present and might be deleted. Fabric Administrators can control the retention period for workspaces as one of the tenant settings. The default is set to 7 days but can be extended up to 90 days!

90 days is a lot! A full three months to figure out that you deleted something. Honestly, I would not set it to the max directly. Typically, solutions that might be used on monthly bases, like month-end closing reports and so on, you might want to extend the retention period. Setting it to 30 days might be just a bit too tight. Therefore, I would opt for 45 days retention.