How to search in a SharePoint recycle bin?

Helping out with (small) company IT. Everyone using Office365, SharePoint, OneDrive.

The level of tech savvy is not high among users. People often deleting files, which I then need to find/restore. But going to SharePoint online and trying to find things in the recycle bin is misery.

For example, today, I needed to find a copy of an .xls document that I knew the name of, but not the delete date for. SharePoint recycle bin just asks me to scroll through everything deleted, from today on back into history.

There must be a better way.

You can use Get-PnpRecycleBinItems and Restore-PnpRecycleBinItems which are part of PnP PowerShell.

Install-Module -Name PnP.PowerShell

Once it's installed, you can connect to your site collection with this:

Connect-PnPOnline -Url https://yourtenant-my.sharepoint.com/personal/jdoe_yourtenant_com -Interactive

(Note, that authentication can be tricky. See the github docs for full details.)

From there, you can enumerate the list of things in the recycle bin:

$items = Get-PnpRecycleBinItems
# select the item(s) you want to restore; you could also use
# Where-Object to filter if you wanted
$itemsToRestore = $items | Out-GridView -OutputMode Multiple
$itemsToRestore | Restore-PnpRecycleBinItems