SharePoint Online: Search Recycle Bin using PowerShell

Requirement: Search SharePoint online recycle bin for all files deleted by a particular user

How to search SharePoint Online Recycle Bin?
To find all items deleted by a particular user,

• Navigate to your SharePoint Online site, Click on Site Settings Gear >> Choose "Site Settings"
• From the Site settings page, Click on "Recycle bin" from Site Collection Administration. This page gives you all deleted items in the site collection along with deleted by user data.
  

However, the searching SharePoint Online recycle bin through web user interface is painful when you have lot of deleted files. So, Let's use PowerShell to get deleted files from Recycle bin.

PowerShell script to Search SharePoint Online Recycle bin:
Here is the SharePoint Online PowerShell to search recycle bin.

#Load SharePoint Online Assemblies
Add-Type -Path "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\16\ISAPI\Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll"
Add-Type -Path "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\16\ISAPI\Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll"
   
##Variables for Processing
$SiteUrl = "https://crescent.sharepoint.com/sites/Sales"
$AdminUserName="[email protected]"
$DeletedByUserAccount="[email protected]"

#Get the password to connect 
$Password = Read-host -assecurestring "Enter Password for $AdminUserName"
$Credentials = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SharePointOnlineCredentials($AdminUserName,$Password)
 
Try {    
    #Setup the context
    $Context = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext($SiteUrl)
    $Context.Credentials = $Credentials
    
    #Get the site recycle bin
    $Site = $Context.Site
    $RecycleBinItems = $Site.RecycleBin
    $Context.Load($Site)
    $Context.Load($RecycleBinItems)
    $Context.ExecuteQuery()

    #Get all items deleted by particular user in Recycle bin
    $DeletedByUser = $RecycleBinItems | Where {$_.DeletedByEmail -eq $DeletedByUserAccount}
    Write-Host "Total Number of Items deleted by user:" $DeletedByUser.Count
    
    #format output as table and print to console
    $DeletedByUser | Select Title, DeletedByEmail, DeletedDate | Format-Table
}
catch {
    write-host "Error: $($_.Exception.Message)" -foregroundcolor Red
}

PnP PowerShell to Get SharePoint Online Recycle bin Items:
Here is how to search SharePoint Online recycle bin with PnP PowerShell.

#Config Variables
$SiteURL = "https://crescenttech.sharepoint.com/sites/marketing"

#Connect to PnP Online
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $SiteURL -Credentials (Get-Credential)

#Get Recycle bin Items
Get-PnPRecycleBinItem | Select Title, ItemType, Size, ItemState, DirName, DeletedByName, DeletedDate | Format-table -AutoSize

This PowerShell script gets all items from given SharePoint Online site collection's recycle bin:

You can export recycle bin items data to a CSV file by:

#Get Recycle bin Items and Export to CSV
Get-PnPRecycleBinItem | Select Title, ItemType, Size, ItemState, DirName, DeletedByName, DeletedDate | Export-Csv "C:\Temp\RecycleBin.csv" -NoTypeInformation

This script gets you all deleted item's data from both first stage and second stage recycle bins.