Trash and restoring
Why a waiting period exists
Deleting the wrong form is an easy mistake — a similarly named draft, a form someone else on the team still needed. If deleting removed everything on the spot, that mistake would be unrecoverable the moment you clicked the button. The 30-day window exists purely so that a slip of the finger is not a disaster.
What actually happens when you delete a form
| Moment | What happens |
|---|---|
| You delete it | The form disappears from your main forms list immediately. Its public link, if it was published, stops accepting new responses right away. |
| While it sits in Trash | Nothing about it is touched. Every response already collected stays attached to it — the Trash list even shows you how many responses each deleted form is holding, so you can tell at a glance whether restoring it matters. |
| 30 days pass with no action | The form and everything attached to it is permanently removed. There is no further recovery step after this point — no support request will bring it back. |
| You click Delete forever | An organization Admin can skip the wait: the form, its responses and uploaded files are removed at once, after a confirmation. A form that is still a step in a Form App must be removed from the app first — until then it is kept, even past 30 days. |
Bringing a form back
- 1Open Trash. Every deleted form is listed with how long ago it was deleted and, importantly, how many days remain before it auto-deletes — shown in red once only a few days are left, so an urgent one is hard to miss.
- 2Click Restore next to the form you want back, and confirm.
- 3The form reappears in your regular forms list — as a draft. It does not go live again automatically; if it was published before, you need to publish it again for its public link to start accepting responses.
Apps have their own Trash
This page describes deleted forms. A deleted app goes to a separate Trash on the Apps page (organization admins only), where it can be restored exactly as it was, or deleted for good by typing its name.
Two differences are deliberate. An app is never deleted automatically — there is no 30-day clock, because a programme can hold years of records. And deleting an app for good removes only the app itself (its steps, assigned people and reporting windows): the records and the entries already submitted are kept. See Running a programmefor the full picture. Removing a single step or reporting period from an app's configuration is still immediate and does not go through Trash.
Frequently asked questions
- How long are deleted forms kept?
- They stay in Trash for 30 days, where they can be restored, before permanent removal.