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Why this guide matters for monday.com users
Monday.com is mission-critical for teams running sales pipelines, project workflows, engineering sprints, onboarding processes, and client operations. But here's the reality: 55% of teams experience data loss from accidental deletion, human error, or system issues.
This comprehensive guide shows you:
✓ How to safely delete and restore data in monday.com
✓ What monday.com's native recovery can and CAN'T do
✓ How to prevent permanent data loss
✓ A complete backup strategy for business continuity
Who this guide is for:
- IT Administrators managing monday.com for their company
- Project Managers responsible for team workflows
- Operations Managers protecting business-critical data
- Compliance Officers ensuring data retention requirements
👉 Start your 7-day free trial at ProBackup: https://app.probackup.io/onboarding
Understanding monday.com's data structure
The hierarchy of monday.com data
Before you delete anything, understand how monday.com organizes data. Deletion flows downward, removing a high-level container removes everything inside it.
Monday.com Data Hierarchy:
Account
└── Workspace
├── Folder / Sub-folder (optional)
│ └── Board
│ ├── Group
│ │ ├── Item (row)
│ │ │ ├── Subitem
│ │ │ ├── Updates (comments)
│ │ │ └── File attachments
│ │ └── Columns (Status, Date, Text, People…)
│ └── Views
├── Dashboard
└── Workdoc
Important: Deleting a Workspace or Board removes:
❌ All boards, groups, and items inside it
❌ All subitems and their data
❌ All updates (comments) and communication history
❌ All file attachments
❌ All column data across every item
❌ All views, dashboards connected to that board
How to archive and delete data in monday.com
Best practice: Archive vs. Delete
🟢 Archive: Recommended 99% of the time
- Removes item from active view without deleting any data
- Preserves all data and history indefinitely
- Can be restored at any time, even years later
- Archived items can be automated — set up rules to archive completed items automatically
- No permanent consequences
🔴 Delete: Use with extreme caution
- Moves to Trash with a 30-day retention window
- Permanently erased after 30 days — monday.com support cannot recover it
- Comments and certain file types may not be recoverable even within 30 days
- Cannot be undone after the Trash window expires
How to archive an item
- Select the item in the board view
- Click the three dots (...) in the item popup at the bottom of the screen
- Choose Archive
- Confirm the action — the item disappears from the active board but is preserved
To restore: open the board → three-dot menu (...) → View archive/trash → Archive tab → find the item → Restore
How to archive a group
- Click the three-dot menu (...) to the left of the group name on your board
- Select Archive group
- Confirm — the group and all its items are preserved
To restore: open the board → three-dot menu (...) → View archive/trash → Archive tab → filter by Group → Restore
How to archive a board
- Click the three-dot menu (...) next to the board name in the left sidebar
- Select Archive board
- The board moves to the Board Archive, hidden from the active workspace
To restore: click the three-dot menu (...) in the workspace navigation bar → View archive/trash → Archive → find the board → Restore. You can also use Search Everything (magnifying glass icon) → Archived Boards → open the board → board menu → Unarchive board
How to delete an item
- Select the item in the board
- Click the three-dot menu (...) in the item popup
- Select Delete
- Confirm — item moves to Trash, recoverable for 30 days
How to delete a group
- Click the three-dot menu (...) to the left of the group name
- Select Delete
- Confirm — the group and all items inside move to Trash, recoverable for 30 days
How to delete a column
- Click the three-dot menu (...) at the top of the column header
- Select Delete column
- Confirm the action
⚠️ Warning: Deleting a column removes that data point from every single item on the board, across all groups, instantly. There is no selective undo in monday.com. The column moves to Trash, but the data values inside each item may not be fully restored even if the column is recovered. If a column is accidentally deleted, your only reliable path back is a backup that pre-dates the deletion.
How to delete a board
- Click the three-dot menu (...) next to the board name in the left sidebar
- Select Delete board
- Confirm — the board and all its contents move to Trash, recoverable for 30 days
How to delete a workspace
- Open the left side panel and hover over the workspace name
- Click the three-dot menu (...) next to its name
- Select Delete workspace
- Confirm — the workspace moves to Trash for 30 days
⚠️ Warning: Restoring a deleted workspace from Trash gives you back only the workspace container. You must restore each board inside it separately from Trash. Do not delete a workspace unless you have already archived or backed up the boards within it.
How to restore data in monday.com
Monday.com offers two parallel recovery paths: Archive (indefinite, for items you deliberately put away) and Trash (30-day window, for accidentally deleted data).
How to access the Archive
For items, subitems, groups (board-level):
- Open the board containing the archived data
- Click the three-dot menu (...) in the upper-right corner of the board
- Click View archive/trash, then select the Archive tab
- Browse or filter by type (Item, Subitem, Group), date archived, or board name
- Select the item(s) and click Restore
For archived boards:
- Click the three-dot menu (...) above the workspace navigation bar in the left panel
- Select View archive/trash → Archive
- Find the board and click Restore
How to access the Trash
- Click your avatar/profile picture in the upper-right corner
- Select Trash
- Browse deleted items — filter by type (Item, Subitem, Column, Group, Board, Doc, Dashboard), date deleted, or board name
- Click the three-dot menu (...) to the right of the item
- Select Restore
💡 Permissions note: Only admins and the person who deleted an item can see and restore it from Trash. If a board was set to "Only owners can change" permissions, non-owners will not see deleted items from that board in Trash.
Restoration options and retention summary
What can't be restored natively in monday.com
Monday.com's Archive and Trash are useful for catching recent mistakes, but they have critical limitations that can lead to permanent, unrecoverable data loss.
1. Comments and updates are gone immediately
When a team member deletes an update (comment) on an item, it does not go to Trash. It disappears instantly and permanently. There is no recovery path, native or otherwise, without a third-party backup.
2. No version history or data rollback
This is the limitation that causes the most damage in practice. If a board still exists but the data inside it has changed — wrong values, overwritten fields, a corrupted import — monday.com has no way to show you what it looked like before.
The activity log tells you that a change happened and who made it. It does not let you revert those changes at scale.
Common causes of silent data corruption:
- ✗ A bulk import maps columns incorrectly and overwrites existing data across hundreds of items
- ✗ An automation rule fires on unintended items and changes Status, Date, or custom field values
- ✗ monday.com's AI Sidekick misinterprets a prompt and updates records at scale
- ✗ A third-party integration syncs incorrectly and bulk-pushes wrong values
- ✗ An API script runs against the wrong board or workspace
None of these are deletions, so they don't appear in Trash. The activity log shows what happened — but reversing it manually at scale is not realistic.
3. The 30-day hard cutoff
Monday.com confirms in their own documentation that anything deleted more than 30 days ago is permanently gone. There is no extended retention window, no archive tier for deleted items, and no way to request recovery from their support team after that point.
4. Files uploaded directly to items
Files attached to an item via the Files tab are not available through monday.com's API and are not reliably recoverable after deletion. Files shared through file columns or comments can be backed up, but direct item uploads are a known gap.
5. What monday.com support can and cannot do
Common data loss scenarios & solutions
Scenario 1: "I accidentally deleted a board with 6 months of client work"
What happened: A PM was tidying up the workspace and clicked Delete instead of Archive on an active client board. Noticed the mistake 3 weeks later.
Native solution:
✓ Go to your avatar menu → Trash
✓ Filter by Board, find the item, click Restore
✓ All groups, items, and history are recovered
✓ Must be done within 30 days
If it happened 31+ days ago:
✗ Data is permanently gone
✗ No native recovery option
✗ Must rebuild from emails, exports, or memory
Scenario 2: "Someone deleted all the updates on our items"
What happened: A team member "cleaned up" tasks by deleting comment threads across 80 items. All decision history, client approvals, and context are now gone.
Native solution:
✗ Deleted updates (comments) do not go to Trash
✗ Once deleted, they are immediately and permanently gone
✗ Monday.com support cannot recover them
✗ No workaround exists natively
Impact:
- Lost proof of client approvals
- No context on why decisions were made
- Team must reconstruct discussions from memory or email
Scenario 3: "A column was accidentally deleted — and took data with it"
What happened: An editor deleted a custom Priority column, thinking it was a duplicate. The column affected 300 items across 12 groups. The column appeared in Trash, but restoring it did not recover all the original cell values.
Native solution:⚠️ Column goes to Trash and can be restored within 30 days, but the individual cell values stored in that column are not guaranteed to return✗ For a column deleted more than 30 days ago: permanently gone✗ If cell values are lost even after column restoration, there is no further native recovery path
Scenario 4: "Our automation overwrote all our item statuses"
What happened: An automation rule was misconfigured and updated the Status column on 500 items across three boards to the wrong value. The items still exist: The data inside them is just wrong.
Native solution:
✗ Items weren't deleted, so Trash doesn't help
✗ Activity log shows what changed but cannot revert it at scale
✗ No version history to roll back to✗ Manual correction across 500 items: 10+ hours of work
Scenario 5: "Monday.com AI Sidekick updated the wrong boards"
What happened: A team member used monday.com's AI Sidekick to bulk-update item fields. The prompt was ambiguous and the agent applied changes to the wrong workspace boards, overwriting statuses and dates across hundreds of items.
Native solution:
✗ These are data changes, not deletions, so Trash is irrelevant
✗ Activity log confirms the changes occurred but cannot undo them in bulk
✗ No rollback mechanism exists in monday.com for AI-driven updates
✗ Manual correction required
Scenario 6: "A departing employee deleted everything on their way out"
What happened: An admin-level employee deleted 9 boards and their workspace before their last day. The deletions were intentional.
Native solution:
✗ If within 30 days: boards can be restored from Trash by another admin
✗ If the workspace was also deleted: boards must be restored separately from Trash after restoring the workspace shell
✗ After 30 days: everything is permanently gone
✗ No audit trail showing what data existed before deletion
Quick reference: "I lost data — what should I do?"
Summary: Why Archive and Trash aren't enough for professional teams
Monday.com's native recovery tools are designed to catch immediate mistakes — not to serve as a disaster recovery plan. Here is how they stack up:
Compliance & data retention
Data retention requirements by industry
GDPR Compliance: the "Right to Be Forgotten"
When an EU citizen requests deletion of their personal data, you must delete it from production systems and backups, and document it within 30 days.
How this works with monday.com + ProBackup:
Step 1: Delete user data from monday.com — remove the person from your account, delete items assigned to them, and purge personal data from column values.
Step 2: Request deletion from ProBackup — open a support ticket specifying the user and date range. ProBackup purges that user's data from backup storage.
Step 3: Export a deletion certificate from ProBackup for your GDPR compliance documentation.
👉 Read our full GDPR guide: Handling GDPR Deletion Requests in Your Backup System
SOC 2 & ISO 27001: what auditors look for
Protect your monday.com data today
Don't wait for a data loss disaster to implement backup. As monday.com expands into AI-powered workflows with Sidekick and agentic automations, the risk of bulk, unintended data changes grows alongside the risk of accidental deletion. A single misconfigured agent or automation can touch every item on a board before anyone notices — and the activity log will show you it happened, but won't undo it.
ProBackup gives you:
✓ Automated daily backups of all your monday.com data
✓ Unlimited retention (no 30-day expiration)
✓ Point-in-time recovery (restore from any date)
✓ Granular restore (one item, one board, or everything)
✓ Google Drive sync (you own your data)
✓ SOC 2 Type II certified (enterprise-ready)
✓ 5-minute setup (no technical knowledge needed)
👉 Start your 7-day free trial at ProBackup: https://app.probackup.io/onboarding
