Workflow deleting items from One Drive RecycleBin

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Posted on by bart_hek

Hello

My problem is that I have several workflows which delete files and as consequence I am lacking space on One Drive - need to empty Recycle Bin pretty often; else my workflows fail lacking space to write. I need a workflow to delete items in the One Drive Recycle Bin:

=> I do not see any connector to One Drive Recycle Bin; I do not use (and don't want to use) "Premium" connectors

=> Connectors like One Drive List files in folder do not allow mapping to the Recycle Bin; it seems like it is at the same hierarchy level as One Drive for Business / Root, but you can only see and pick Root, while you can not see or pick RecycleBin

=> I tried sending HTTP call to https://******-my.sharepoint.com, to _api/web/recyclebin, but body of the 200 response is this an empty JSON - although quite certainly I have MB's of files in the RecycleBin

I see that @JSINFO coped with same/very similar problem in 2023: https://community.powerplatform.com/forums/thread/details/?threadid=887ee60a-9524-4451-a937-152da1dcc50b - this remained unanswered

Any smart ideas? Could someone please walk me through step by step? Thank you!

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Building flows

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ronaldwalcott 3,866 Moderator on at

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You can consider a different approach by using retention policies. See Automatically retain or delete content by using retention policies | Microsoft Learn. It would require your system admin to configure it for the account and it should work.

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David_MA 14,351 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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You may want to discuss with your IT department about increasing the storage of your OneDrive. It can be increased up to 25TB: Change a specific user's OneDrive storage space - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn. The issue doesn't seem like you are hording files, it is just that the files are not being emptied from the recycle bin fast enough to keep your OneDrive below its limit.

Maybe you could create a SharePoint site and create some of the files in the site's document library for some of your flows and delete them like you do in OneDrive once they're not needed. This would give you more capacity while you wait for the files to automatically purge, or you manually empty the recycle bin.

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Michael E. Gernaey 53,976 Moderator on at

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Hi @bart_hek

I wanted to share this so you can compare what you are doing.

Delete document also from Recycle bin with Power Automate

You can also have your admins create you a PowerShell script, which can then be called by Power Automate

https://powershellcommands.com/power-automate-run-powershell-script

You can also use HTTP connector with Graph API

Delete a file or folder - Microsoft Graph v1.0 | Microsoft Learn

If this helps, please Mark as such and maybe a like :-)

Cheers

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