How to retrieve deleted records from Salesforce recycle bin

Last published at: December 20th, 2021
Delete

When you accidentally merge records that were not supposed to be merged, all records in this process except the master record will have been deleted.

In this how-to, we will show you how to retrieve records from the recycle bin in Salesforce Classic. The recycle bin is not available for Salesforce Lightning.

Navigate to the Recycle bin

The recycle bin can be accessed from the home page of your Salesforce organization in Classic only since it is not available in Salesforce Lightning. By default, it is located on the bottom left side of the page. Deleted data is only available for 15 days. After a period of 15 days the data will be permanently deleted from the Recycle bin. Make sure to access this page in the 15 days period if you want to restore items.

After clicking on the Recycle bin icon, you will be redirected to the recycle bin page:

Overview settings:

You can choose to view only your deleted items or recycle bin items from other users via the "View" drop-down menu option.
Use the search box to search for specific items.

My recycle bin View only items deleted by your user.
All recycle bin View deleted items from all users.

Actions:

All relations and related information between the merged records like information, attachments, opportunities etc., will be attached to the master record. The relations and related information cannot be recovered when you undelete the records.

Restores the record or records marked by the checkbox
Remove all items from your Recycle bin (Permanently deleted)
Remove all items from your organization's Recycle bin. (Permanently deleted)
Delete

Related Information

Deleted data is only available for 15 days. After 15 days, data is permanently deleted from the Recycle Bin. It will be lost forever.

Restoring deleted data is not available to all users. Administrators and users with the “Modify All Data” permission are the only ones who can restore lost data from the Recycle Bin; all other users would have to contact them for assistance. This will result in lost productivity and create an additional burden for Salesforce administrators.

Doesn’t retain all versions of the data. If a user accidentally changed a record before deleting it, they’ll only be able to recover the latest version with the incorrect information, not any previous correct or point-in-time versions which may be what the user actually wishes to restore.

Metadata is lost. Any customizations, reports, dashboards, etc. cannot be restored and must be manually recreated. This can be painful and costly to rebuild these bits of information. In addition, if other processes or teams are dependent upon these customizations, more than just the user who lost data can be affected.