Empty recycle bins (bulk)
Clear many sites at once
Pick several sites and permanently empty their recycle bins in one pass, optionally cascading into the second stage. This is how you actually reclaim the storage that deleted content is still holding. It is irreversible, so the confirmation states the count and the sites before anything happens.
What it does
- How much storage would come back, per site, before you commit.
- Which sites were emptied and what was purged, in a report kept for 90 days.
How it runs
- Sign in. Tenant-wide listing needs the SharePoint administrator role.
- Pick the sites. Any mix. Select all is available.
- Choose whether to cascade. First stage only, or first and second.
- Confirm, then it runs. The confirmation states the site count. Cancel offers Finish the current item, Stop now, or Keep running. Nothing is left half-written: an item is either done or not started.
How it works
Sites are processed one at a time. For each site ShareMaster first checks whether your account is a site collection administrator there. If it is not, the account is added as one; when the account cannot open the site at all (another person's OneDrive, typically), that grant is made through the SharePoint admin centre, using your sign-in name read from the tenant's root site. The grant is removed again when the site is finished, including after a failure or a stop, and a removal that fails is shown on the site's row and in the completion summary rather than left in a log.
If you choose to list each bin first, every item in the bins about to be emptied is read and written to the run's log before anything is deleted. That is the only way the report can say afterwards what was destroyed, because SharePoint's empty does not say what it removed. Without the listing, the report records which sites were emptied but not what they held. Either way, a record that the site is about to be emptied is written before the request goes out.
With subsites included, each site collection's bin is emptied, which covers every subsite under it. With subsites left out, only each picked site's own bin is emptied, and the listing and the re-counts are narrowed to that site. The second stage is only offered with subsites included, because it belongs to the whole site collection. After each empty the bin is read again and emptied again until nothing is left; if a pass removes nothing, the site is marked failed with the number of items still there. When the account can only reach a site's end-user bin, its subsites are emptied one at a time, and any subsite bin that could not be emptied makes that site's row amber rather than green.
A failure on one site is recorded and the run moves on to the next. A lost sign-in stops the sweep, because every later site would fail the same way, and the sites already emptied stay in the report. Finish the current item lets the site under way complete its listing and its log, then starts no more; Stop now cancels it. The run, its per-site results and anything listed are kept in the recovered file history.
What you need
- SharePoint administrator rights.
What it will not do
- There is no undo. Purging a recycle bin is the operation, and the content is gone.
- Run the Recycle bin report first if you want to know what you are about to destroy, or to get somebody's agreement to it.
- SharePoint's own storage figures take a day or so to catch up afterwards.