When you delete a document, it is not gone straight away. It moves to the Trash, where it waits for 30 days. After that it is removed for good. Until then you can bring it back with everything it had: its tabs, its slide deck, its comments and history, its stars and its share links.
This works the same whether you are signed in or working as a guest.
Opening the Trash
Choose Trash, the last row of the More group at the bottom of the Explorer sidebar, or open Settings, go to Account, and choose Open Trash. Both work for guests too, and on deployments without accounts. The Trash lists everything you can restore, grouped:
- Your documents: the ones you deleted from your own space.
- One group per team you belong to: team documents go to that team's Trash, and any member of the team can restore them or delete them for good, just as any member can delete them.
- This browser only: offline documents live only in this browser, so their Trash does too.
Each document shows when it was deleted and how many days it has left. One that is past its 30 days but not yet removed reads "Removed at the next clean-up": removal runs once a day, so a document usually stays for up to a day longer.
Restoring a document
Choose Restore; it needs no confirmation, because it destroys nothing. The document goes back to the folder it was in, or, if that folder has been deleted since, to the folder that held it (the root of My documents, or of its team, for a top-level folder). Its share links work again, and anyone you shared it with can open it as before.
If you open a deleted document by its address and it is in your own Trash, the card that says it was deleted offers Restore too, with the days it has left.
Deleting for good
Choose Delete permanently to remove one document now, with its history, or Empty Trash to remove everything in one group (only that group: emptying a team's Trash empties it for the whole team). Both ask you to confirm, and neither can be undone.
A tab that is also in another document is never lost when a document is deleted for good: it stays in the other document, exactly where it was.
While a document is in the Trash
A deleted document disappears from your lists, Recent, Favourites, search, the Timeline and the Inbox. Anyone opening one of its share links sees that it was deleted, and anyone who still had it open is told so, and can no longer save changes to it.
Empty documents
A document with nothing on any of its tabs, left unchanged for 30 days, moves to the Trash on its own. Its row in the Trash says it was moved there because it was empty, so you can tell it apart from one you deleted, and it waits the usual 30 days there before it is removed for good. Nothing is sent to tell you: there was nothing in it to lose.
Restore it like any other and it comes back as it was, with another 30 days before it could be moved again. Team documents go to the team's Trash, where any member can restore them. Offline documents are never moved.
Taking your own document offline is a move, not a delete, so it never goes to the Trash. (When a teammate takes a team document offline, it leaves the team, so for the team it goes to the team's Trash.) Deleting your account removes your own documents straight away, the Trash included.
For scripts and AI tools
Deleting a document through the API or an AI tool also moves it to the Trash. An AI tool can list your Trash and restore a document from it, but it can never delete one for good; a script using the API can, when it asks for a permanent delete (see Working with Documents).
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