How to Recover Deleted Gmail Account – A Complete Guide

This article gives all the different options to easily recover your deleted business Gmail account.

First, let’s cover all the options available to recover the deleted Gmail account for G Suite (now known as Google Workspace) business or enterprise edition users.

Please note that, for business and enterprise edition users, recovering a Gmail account actually means recovering their user account as a business or enterprise Gmail account cannot exist on it’s own without the corresponding Google account license.

How to Recover A Deleted Google Workspace Account from Google Admin Console?

Super administrators can recover a deleted user in Google Workspace within 20 days of deletion. After 20 days all the data associated with that account will be permanently deleted from Google’s servers and cannot be recovered by any means.

• Step 1: Log in to Google Admin Console with super-admin credentials.
• Step 2:  Click on the option “Users”.
• Step 3: Go to “Users” and click on the “+ add filter” option.
• Step 4: Select the option “recently deleted” from the drop-down menu.

  

• Step 5: Hover over the desired user and click on the “Restore” button.

  

• Step 6: Review and click on the “Continue” button.
• Step 7:  Select the desired organizational unit and click “Recover”.

Note: Users whose accounts were previously suspended will be shown as “suspended”. To know more about recovering a suspended user click here. 

Recovering a Google Workspace administrator account is similar to recovering a Google Workspace user account, apart from a few additional steps. This is because to delete an admin account you have to first remove their admin role.

Follow the same steps to recover the deleted user account and then give them the admin role again if you want that account to be an administrator. To know how to make a G Suite user an administrator click here.

These methods work well when you need to gain access to your account or restore a deleted user account within a few days. But, what if you exceeded the 20-day limit? Or what if you just wanted to restore a particular service, folder, or file instead of the whole account?

In such situations, having a data backup of all your Google accounts is the only way to recover the account. 

How to Recover A Deleted Personal Gmail Account?

If you have recently deleted your personal Gmail account, you can retrieve the account within 2-3 weeks from the date of the account deletion. 

Google does not mention the exact time period available for personal Gmail users to recover their account. 

Let’s say, you deleted your personal Gmail account a few days ago, follow the below steps to recover your recently deleted Gmail account: 

• Step 1: Open the Google Sign-in/Account recovery page and enter your email address.
• Step 2: Click on the “Next” button.
  
  (Google will show this option only if your account is recoverable. If Google says it cannot find an account with this email address, that means you cannot recover your account.)
• Step 3: Enter the last password you remember using with this account.
  
  If you get this right, then you can directly sign in to your account. If not, then move on to the next step.
• Step 4: You will receive a text or call on the phone number that you linked with the account during account creation.
  
  If you did not set up a phone number then move on to step 5.
• Step 5: Enter the verification code that was sent to your recovery email address.
• Step 6: Select the month and year in which you created the account.
  

If none of these steps work, then Google will ask you to give them another email address to contact you. They will get back to you after trying to verify your identity. 

Restore Data from Google Account When You Have a Backup

If you have already taken a backup of your Google account then you can easily restore the data back to a new account in case of account deletion, or recover just the necessary data to an existing account.

In this section, you will learn how to restore Google account data using Google’s native feature (Google Takeout) and a third-party application (SysCloud).

How to Restore Deleted Gmail Account Data Using Google Takeout?

Google Takeout is an in-built Google feature that lets you download your account data. If you had regularly downloaded your data using Google Takeout, then you can restore it to a newly created Google account in case your account was permanently deleted.

Read our blog articles to know more about using Google Takeout to recover deleted Gmail emails and recover deleted Google Drive files. 

If you want to know more about using Google Takeout to backup your data then read our blog post, How to Use Google Takeout for Business (Step-By-Step Guide).

Limitations of Using Google’s Native Features to Recover Google Account Data

• Possible Data loss: Google Takeout requires you to regularly download the data; failing to which results in data loss.
• No direct data restoration: You cannot directly recover your Google account data using Google Takeout or other native features. You will have to use additional tools and email clients to recover data.
• Incomplete restoration: Native features does not restore your data with sharing permissions and folder structure intact for Drive files and emails.

How to Recover Deleted Google Account Data Using Third-Party Applications?

Third-party applications like SysCloud takes regular backup of your data and store it safely in the cloud. SysCloud provides automated cloud to cloud backup and restore, where your data can be stored for an unlimited period. It is an effective and reliable solution to effortlessly recover lost account data during a crisis. 

SysCloud offers a cross-user restore option to restore data from one Google account to another. This feature helps you to easily restore data from the deleted account to a new account with all sharing permissions and folder structure intact.

How to Recover a Permanently Deleted Google Account using SysCloud?

• Step1: Create a new Google account for recovery if you want to recover the entire account data, or if you just want to restore specific files or folders then you can use an existing account.
  
  Note: Don’t forget to add this account to the SysCloud application before you try cross-user restoration.
• Step 2: Log in to your SysCloud account with your admin credentials.
• Step 3: Navigate to the “Backup” option in the menu bar and select the “Archive & Restore” option from the drop-down menu.
• Step 4: Select the user account whose data you want to recover.

  

• Step 5: Select a service that you want to recover and select all files.

  

• Step 6: Click on the “Restore” button on the top left of the page and select the “All” option from the drop-down menu to restore all the files in that service.  You will now be asked to specify the account to which you want to restore the data.

  

• Step 7: Provide the new account name and select “Restore”. All data in the selected service will now be restored to the specified Google account.
• Step 8: Repeat the same steps for all the services – like Google Drive, Contacts, Calendar, and Sites – to restore entire data to the new Google account.
  
  Note: SysCloud provides only service-level restore, therefore, users have to restore the account service by service.