Recover deleted files

[#1]

I have good experience on SharePoint and other CMS's, one thing I noticed when I compare AEM with others, the Recycle Bin is not available in AEM.

If content authors accidentally delete any pages or assets, then it is difficult to get it back, sometimes they need to depend on developers to get it back and it is time consuming process, are there any plans to implement the same in future releases? 

[#2]

Hi Raj,

AEM has a built in version system which keeps versions of the page (automatically while activation).

A|so Versions can be created manually.

See http://localhost:4502/system/console/configMgr/com.day.cq.wcm.core.impl.VersionManagerImpl

If this is not enough, you have to restore the deleted files from a backup. 

Nevertheless you should evaluate the ACLs (privileges) and the author training to prevent such deletions. Also bear in mind that deleting an activated page will delete it from the Publish instance

Best,

Max

[#3]

Yes, Max, Thank you for the quick response, I partially agree with you and it is just my opinion

We know that most of the content authors are not technical people, they don't know how to take it from backup, they need to depend on either developers or admins, which I feel is waste of time and some times will effect on schedule.

Educating content author may or may not solve this problem, there are chances to occur human errors what if by mistake delete the pages or assets before activating and wanted to get it back.

If I have Recycle Bin option, whenever I feel I don't want this page or Asset, then I can freely go and delete it otherwise I need to set up a proper process, something like educating content authors, setting up ACL, etc.

[#4]

@raj_mandalapu 

The current versioning mechanism has been used to for similar purpose as indicated above. I can imagine having a recycle bin to restore deleted files could conflict with versioning strategy on the system. As you know the system is instructed to keep specific number of versions for specific number of days. So you could predict upon restoring files/pages from a recycle bin how challenging is for the system to calculate and maintain the same strategy each time files/pages restore violates the existing settings keep in mind that there can be many many files/pages to restore. Its just one example.

[#5]

Hi @hamidk92094312 ,

I can imagine or put design for this something like below.

• On clicking of the delete button, just move Asset to the Recycle Bin/Trash folder
• While moving add a property to the asset, the property name is something like source="<path of original location>"
• Set expiry time out for the deleted Asset to some amount, ex: 30days
• If content author select Asset to restore, move Asset to the original location by reading source property, we do not need to worry about versioning here, the latest version will get published automatically.
• To avoid version conflict, when the Asset is in Recycle bin, we should not give an option to edit the Asset/Page. All assets which are in Recycle Bin should be read only.
• We know that whenever we move an Asset it will not delete any versions, it still maintains old versions, so I feel we do not need to worry about calculate and maintain the same versioning strategy each time files/pages restore 
• keeping a specific number of versions for a specific number of days may not impact this because when we click on restore we will load the latest version and also after moving Asset to Recycle Bin the versioning history still exists for that Asset/Page

[#6]

Hi @raj_mandalapu 

There is an existing feature request for assets i.e. CQ-4236518
For AEM pages a new feature has been introduced in AEMaaCS where you can archive the page so if used pages can be restored at a later time. [1]

Thanks for your participation in AEM community.

[1] https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-cloud-service/sites/authoring/fundamental...

[#7]

"AEM has a built in version system which keeps versions of the page (automatically while activation)."  This doesn't seem to apply to the cloud version. When assets are created or deleted, there is no version information, and there is no way we have found to restore deleted assets from the dam. 

[#8]

@hamidk92094312 , How can we restore a deleted asset in AEM? Assume a content author configured a Content Fragment and mistakenly deleted it before publishing. How can we restore this complex Content Fragment after spending hours of time on it?

Thanks,

Venkat