Missing teams chat and contents

Hello @Kevin Hoff,  

Thank you for reaching out to the Q&A forum! 

For your situation, please provide me more detail: 

1.Do all members of the group chat also no longer see the conversation, or is it just missing for you? 

2.Is your account a work/school account managed by your organization, or a personal account (Hotmail/Outlook.com)? 

If this is a work account, many organizations apply retention or compliance policies that automatically delete chats after a certain period. 

So, I recommend contacting your IT team to check if such a policy is in place. If that’s the case, recovery is only possible by your IT administrator through Microsoft Purview. 

Here are detail steps you can share to IT admin assist recovery your chat history:  

• You can ask IT admin to open the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, then go to the Microsoft Purview section. 

• In the left-hand navigation pane, select Audit.  

• From there, you can start a search by specifying the date range, users, and activities (such as Teams messages, file access, etc.). 
• Once the search is complete, your admin can export the chat history in a readable format (such as CSV or PST), which can then be shared with you securely. 

I understand that this situation can be a bit complicated to contact your company’s IT department, but only your company’s IT department can access the backend settings, and they manage all of your Microsoft 365 environment, including retention policies and compliance settings. 

About the screenshots not in OneDrive, I’d also like to clarify how the screenshots were shared in your chat: 

Were they sent as media (images displayed directly in the chat) or as files (uploaded using “Attach” or “Upload”)? 

Since you mentioned the screenshots are not in your OneDrive recycle bin, it’s likely they were shared as media. If the chat was deleted due to a retention policy, those images may also be unrecoverable unless your IT admin retrieves them as I mentioned before. 

Note: If this is a personal account, please reply so I can guide you to the appropriate support team.

Looking forward to hearing from you! 

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