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 its share links.
This works the same whether you are signed in or working as a guest. The Trash is shared by every liveworkspace app, so choose All at the top of the page to see a deleted item from another app beside your documents.
Opening the Trash
Choose Trash, the last row of the Explorer sidebar, or open Settings, go to Account, and choose Open Trash. It lists your deleted items, and the deleted items of the teams you belong to: any member of a team can restore its items or delete them for good, just as any member can delete them.
Restoring a document
Open a document's ⋯ menu in the Trash and choose Restore; it needs no confirmation, because it destroys nothing. The document goes back to the folder it was in, its share links work again, and anyone you shared it with can open it as before.
Deleting for good
Choose Delete Forever in a document's menu to remove it now, or Empty Trash at the top of a group to remove everything in it: your own documents, or one team's. Empty Trash removes only documents; deleted items from other liveworkspace apps wait in their own app's Trash. 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, Home and the Inbox. Its share links stop opening it, and anyone who still had it open loses access within a few minutes.
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 went 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. It isn't moved again unless it is changed and then left empty for another 30 days. Team documents go to the team's Trash, where any member can restore them. Documents in This Browser are never moved.
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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