File History - What Happened to a File or Folder

4 min read · Last updated 8 September 2026 · Page version 1

"A folder has gone from SharePoint - what happened to it?" used to mean checking three pages and joining the answers up yourself: Archived Files for a stub, Orphaned Files if the stub had gone too, and Recycle Bin Capture if somebody had deleted it. File History asks all of them at once and gives you one answer.

The File History page: the search, six state counters, a plain-English summary of what happened, deletions by person, a per-folder breakdown, and the file list with each file's state and last event

Running a search

Pick a site, then narrow it one of two ways - or both:

Folder or file path - everything beneath the folder is included. Paste a SharePoint URL and it is accepted as-is.
Filename starts with - a prefix, when you know roughly what the file was called but not where it lived.

Searches are capped at 500 files. If you hit the cap the page says so, and the fix is to narrow the folder or add a filename prefix rather than to search again.

What it tells you

Six counters sit above the detail: how many files were found, how many are archived with a stub still in place, how many were deleted by a user and captured, how many are orphaned, how many have already been restored, and how many are restorable right now.

Beneath them is a plain-English summary. This is the part worth reading first, because it answers the question in the form it was asked - for example that six files were deleted by two people, that Squirrel captured them from the recycle bin, that all six copies are in the archive, that one deleted folder was captured as well, and, importantly, that Squirrel did not delete these files. It is a common first assumption when content disappears, and the page addresses it head-on rather than leaving you to infer it.

Two tables follow:

Deletions by person - who deleted files in this scope, how many, and the first and last time they did. This is the table to open before assuming a mass deletion was malicious; a single person tidying one folder on one afternoon looks very different from the same count spread across weeks.
By folder - the child folders beneath your search path, each with its own counts by state, so you can see whether the loss is concentrated in one place.

The file list

Every file found, with its path, its current state, its last event and the size. A file can carry more than one state - Captured, archived means Squirrel took it from the recycle bin and it now lives in the archive. Expanding a row shows that file's timeline: when it was stubbed, archived, deleted, captured, orphaned or restored, and by whom where a person was involved.

The All states selector filters the list down to one state when you only care about, say, what is orphaned.

Acting on what you find

Each file carries a link to the page that can actually recover it - Restore in Archived Files, Restore in Orphaned Files, or Recover in Recycle Bin Capture. The link carries the filename with it, so the destination page opens with the search already filled in and run. You do not have to retype a filename you have just been reading.

Where the answers come from

File History reads Squirrel's own records - the archive, the recycle-bin capture store, the processing site inventory and the restore history - and merges them per file. It does not query SharePoint, so it is safe to run at any time and tells you what Squirrel knows. A file Squirrel never held will not appear, which is itself an answer: if a file is missing and File History has no record of it, Squirrel was not involved.

Where one of those lookups is slow enough to be cut short, the page says which one and what to do about it, rather than silently returning a partial answer.