The call every office dreads: the file is gone, and because it was in a synced folder, it is gone from every PC at once. The good news — in Synology Drive a deletion is usually a journey, not an ending. Work through the nets in this order.
Sync's dark side is that it deletes everywhere with the same enthusiasm it saves everywhere. But Synology Drive was designed by people who knew this call was coming, so a deleted file passes through several safety nets before it is truly gone. This page walks them in the right order — and is honest about the point where recovery stops being possible.
Three quick moves before any recovery attempt:
Nothing in the steps below is urgent to the minute. The nets hold deleted files quietly; panic is the only thing that destroys them.
Deleted files from Drive folders land in a recycle bin first — check the recycle bin inside the Synology Drive web portal, and for shared folders, the #recycle folder in File Station. Restoring from here is the happiest outcome: the file returns whole, with its name and place intact. Two honest details: for Team Folders, the recycle bin sits on the shared folder and may be visible only to the folder's admins or owner — a normal user may need to ask; and a recycle bin only catches deletions if it was enabled on that shared folder in the first place. Check yours today, not after the accident.
If the file itself is gone but it lived in a Team Folder with version control on, its earlier versions still exist in Drive's database. Deleted items and previous versions can be browsed and restored from the Drive web portal's version/recycle views, and the file comes back at the state of the version you pick. This net also catches the subtler accident — the file that was not deleted but saved over with empty or wrong content. Its limits are the versioning limits: it only knows history recorded after versioning was switched on, and only up to the rotation you set.
If the file lived on someone's PC and that PC had a backup task, open Synology Drive Client on that machine, go to Backup Task > Restore, and browse the backed-up folders by date. This is the net that catches purely local files — the document that never entered a Team Folder at all. It is also why the sync-versus-backup distinction in this series matters: a PC protected only by sync has no net three, because sync kept nothing extra to restore from.
Recovery is not always possible, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. A file is truly gone when all of these are true: the recycle bin was emptied (or never enabled), versioning was off or its history rotated away, no backup task covered it, and the deletion has synced to every copy. At that point the last resort sits outside Drive entirely — a backup of the NAS itself, such as a Hyper Backup job. If the office has none of those either, accept the loss, and treat the pain as the budget approval for switching the nets on. Every single one of them is free and already installed.
Watch the Synology Drive setup video to see where recycle, versioning and backup tasks are configured — the settings this recovery depends on.
▶️ Watch Full VideoUntil the bin is emptied — manually, or by a retention setting an admin configured. There is no universal countdown; it is whatever your NAS is set to. That is good news for recovery and a reminder to check the setting before you need it.
Often not on their own — Team Folder recycle bins and version restore are commonly in the hands of the folder's admin or owner, by design, so one person cannot quietly undelete (or delete-and-restore) shared work. Ask the admin; the file is very likely still there.
Not necessarily. If the folder had version control enabled, earlier versions may still be restorable from Drive's version history even after the bin is emptied. If versioning was off too, the remaining hope is a PC backup task or a backup of the NAS itself.