Finding and restoring your data

This page walks through the four things you will actually do as an end user, in the order you do them: find something, look at it, restore it, or download it. Everything here works on your own mailbox, IMAP account and OneDrive only.

Find a mail or file in a backup

Open Mail & SaaS → Restore explorer in the navigation. You work through three choices, top to bottom:

Person and area: since 0.4.2 the explorer lists one entry per person, not one per mailbox and drive. For you that is a single entry, marked Yours, which brings your mailbox, your OneDrive and your IMAP account together. Next to it, a second column shows what your backups hold, each as its own area: Mail, Calendar, Contacts and OneDrive (and Mail (IMAP) if you have such an account). Choose an area and its folders open underneath. An area that has no backup yet says No backup yet, and one whose source was taken out of protection says Removed; its restore points stay.
Point in time: which restore point to browse. A slim timeline at the bottom of the window shows them, the oldest on the left and the newest on the right, with one marker per restore point that shows whether a restore check has already proven that backup can be read back. The restore point you are browsing sits in the centre, and the timeline opens on the newest. Restow keeps several points in time, not just the latest one, so you can go back to before a specific change if you need to.
Browse or search: once a point in time is chosen, its folders open in a tree on the left with a list of entries on the right, exactly as that mailbox or drive looked at that moment. Use Search this backup to jump straight to something instead of clicking through folders; it matches names, paths and mail subjects at that point in time (not the text inside a message body or file).

Calendar. The calendar of your mailbox opens as a List or as a Month (the switch Show the calendar as). The list sorts the events by when they start, Newest first or Upcoming first, with the columns When, Location and Organizer, no longer by subject. The month view shows the days of the month across all your calendars or just one, with arrows to the previous and next month. A recurring appointment stands once in the list, marked Series: open it to see every occurrence. Restow works the occurrences out from the stored pattern and puts the changed ones in their place. An occurrence that someone deleted on its own in Outlook is not recorded in the backup (Microsoft Graph does not report cancelled occurrences), so it can still show up here, just as it would come back if you restored the series.

Selecting a mail or file shows its version history below its details: how it looked across your different backups, so you can open, restore or download an earlier version specifically, not only the newest one.

Preview and print

Selecting an item shows its details: for a mail, the subject, sender, recipients, date, and whether it has attachments, is read or flagged; for a file, its size, type, modified date and full path. For a mail, the message itself appears below the details in a reading pane: its headers, its text or HTML body and its attachments, each of which you can download, and a Print button. That is enough to confirm you have the right item before you restore or download it, and before you confirm a restore, Restow lists exactly what you are about to restore (how many items and, for a handful, their names) as a last check.

Some mail cannot be shown: a message that is rights-protected or S/MIME-encrypted, one that is too large, or one stored in a format the reading pane cannot display. For those, download it or restore it into the mailbox instead.

A preview of a file’s content is not available yet; for a file you see its details only. It is planned; this page will be updated the moment it ships.

Restore

Select what you want back (a single mail, a file, a folder, or an entire mailbox/OneDrive at that point in time) and choose Restore…. You then choose where it goes:

Original location (the default): back into the account it came from.
Another account: only offered to tenant administrators, for example to restore into a stand-in mailbox.
Download as ZIP: see Download below.

Restore in Restow is built to be non-destructive: by default it keeps restored items alongside whatever is already in your mailbox or OneDrive rather than replacing or deleting anything. Mail is restored into a new, clearly named folder (for example “Restored 2026-09-23 1432”), so it never mixes back into your existing folders unannounced; a OneDrive file that would collide with one already there is restored under a new name instead of overwriting it. Restoring your own data needs no justification beyond picking what you want; you only have to give a reason when an administrator restores something on your behalf.

An older version that OneDrive itself kept (separate from Restow’s own backups) can only be downloaded, not restored back in place.

Every restore you start is queued as a job you can follow on the Recent restores tab of the Restore explorer: its progress while it runs, and afterwards exactly what was restored, skipped, or failed, when it was requested, and by whom: your own record of the restore, kept for as long as your organization keeps its audit log.

Download

Instead of restoring into a mailbox or OneDrive, choose Download as ZIP: mail comes out as individual .eml files (openable in any mail client), other files as they are, together with a checksum list so you can verify nothing changed in transit. The download link stays valid for 24 hours; if you navigate away, you can get back to it from the Recent restores tab, where the same request shows a Download ZIP action until it expires.

Once you have restored or downloaded what you needed, see Usage for what else Restow does for you day to day, including what is still being built.