Recover Deleted Data and Services

Hi Tiago V. Sousa, Sorry to hear about the trial expiring and your resources getting cleaned up. Here’s what you need to know:

1.Subscription reactivation is mandatory

• When a free trial expires, the subscription goes into a disabled/deprovisioned state.
• You can’t run any recovery operations (portal access, API calls, diagnostics) until the subscription is upgraded or reactivated.

2.Once you’ve upgraded (even temporarily), you can look at each resource type and its recovery path:

A. Storage Accounts

• You can recover a deleted storage account up to 14 days after deletion (ARM model only).
  • Prerequisites: no new account with the same name, resource group still exists, you have Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/write permission.
  • Use the “Recover storage account” blade in the portal or the ARM REST API.

B. File Shares

• If Soft Delete was enabled on the file share before deletion, you can undelete the entire share within the retention window.
  • If you had Azure Backup configured, you can restore individual files or full shares from a recovery point.

C. Blobs / Containers

• If Blob Soft Delete or Container Soft Delete was enabled, you can undelete within the retention period (you pick the retention window when you enable it).
  • For ADLS Gen2 (hierarchical namespace), you can self-recover if soft delete was on, or ask Microsoft for a best‐effort restore if deleted within the last three days.

D. Other Services

• VMs, SQL Databases, Cosmos DB, etc., don’t have a “undelete” switch—recovery depends entirely on whether you had backups or snapshots in place.

To give you exact guidance, please let me know:

1. Which resource types you need to recover (Storage Accounts, File Shares, Blobs, VMs, SQL DB, etc.)?
   1. Names of the resources or resource groups, and the exact deletion timestamps.
   2. Whether you had Soft Delete, versioning, snapshots, or Azure Backup enabled on those resources.
   3. Which region they were in (in case geo-redundancy rules apply).

Once we have that information and you’ve reactivated the subscription, I can walk you through the precise recovery steps for each resource.

Kindly let us know if the above helps or you need further assistance on this issue.

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