Frequently asked questions - Soft delete

No, it's a built-in feature and enabled by default for all the Recovery Services vaults.

No, it's fixed to 14 days of additional retention after the delete operation.

No, this 14-day additional retention comes free of cost as a part of soft-delete functionality.

No, you need to undelete the soft deleted resource in order to restore. The undelete operation will bring the resource back into the Stop protection with retain data state where you can restore to any point in time. Garbage collector remains paused in this state.

Yes.

Undelete followed by a resume operation will protect the resource again. The resume operation associates a backup policy to trigger the scheduled backups with the selected retention period. Also, the garbage collector runs as soon as the resume operation completes. If you wish to perform a restore from a recovery point that's past its expiration date, you're advised to do it before triggering the resume operation.

The Recovery Services vault can't be deleted if there are backup items in soft-deleted state in the vault. The soft-deleted items are permanently deleted 14 days after the delete operation. If you can't wait for 14 days, then disable soft delete, undelete the soft deleted items, and delete them again to permanently get deleted. After ensuring there are no protected items and no soft deleted items, the vault can be deleted.

No. You can't force-delete the soft-deleted items. They're automatically deleted after 14 days. This security feature is enabled to safeguard the backed-up data from accidental or malicious deletes. You should wait for 14 days before performing any other action on the item. Soft-deleted items won't be charged. If you need to reprotect the items marked for soft-delete within 14 days in a new vault, then contact Microsoft support.

Soft delete operations can be performed using PowerShell. Currently, CLI isn't supported.

Manage the soft delete features in Azure Backup.