Overview
As Microsoft Fabric environments mature and become more collaborative, the risk of accidental deletion increases. A data engineer cleaning up a workspace, an analyst removing unused assets, or a contributor misunderstanding dependencies can easily delete the wrong item. Until recently, that deletion was permanent.
Microsoft Fabric now introduces item-level recovery through soft delete, providing a critical safety net for supported Fabric items. This capability complements existing workspace retention and adds fine-grained protection at the item level.
Item recovery allows deleted items to be retained for a configurable period, during which authorized users can restore them or permanently delete them. This feature is currently available in preview and must be explicitly enabled at the tenant level.
Prerequisites and Configuration
Item recovery is disabled by default and requires explicit tenant-level configuration.
To enable item recovery:
If item recovery is not enabled, deleting an individual item results in permanent deletion with no recovery option.
Supported Item Types
Item recovery (soft delete) in Microsoft Fabric applies only to supported item types. When one of these items is deleted and item recovery is enabled, it enters a soft-deleted state and becomes recoverable during the configured retention window. Items not on this list are permanently deleted immediately.
Currently supported item types include:
This expanded list reflects Fabric’s continued evolution beyond traditional analytics artifacts, covering data engineering, real-time analytics, machine learning, graph workloads, mirroring technologies, and domain-specific solutions. As Fabric adds new workloads and item types, support for item-level recovery is expected to continue expanding.
Permissions and Access Model
Item recovery respects existing Fabric workspace roles and does not introduce a new security model.
Role-Based Capabilities:
This model ensures that recovery actions remain aligned with ownership and governance boundaries already defined within Fabric.
What Can Be Recovered
When a supported item is restored within the retention window, it is returned to its original state.
Recovery preserves:
This ensures restored items remain fully integrated into the existing Fabric ecosystem, without introducing security gaps or lineage inconsistencies.
Final Thoughts
Item recovery (soft delete) addresses a long-standing operational gap in Microsoft Fabric by providing protection at the individual item level, not just the workspace level. In collaborative environments with frequent changes, this capability significantly reduces risk and recovery effort.
However, it should be enabled intentionally:
As Fabric adoption grows and environments scale, item-level recovery moves from a convenience feature to a foundational governance control. Used correctly, it provides resilience without adding operational complexity.
If you’re already using Microsoft Fabric, or considering it, and aren’t sure how you should architect a new design or evolve an existing one, let’s talk.