Draft Group Chats Disappeared

Unfortunately, if your draft group chats have disappeared from Microsoft Teams, there is no direct method to recover them. Drafts in Teams are not retained indefinitely, and if they are not saved or sent, they may be lost. It's advisable to check if there are any updates or changes in your Teams settings or if there is a possibility of recovering them through your organization's IT support.

If you are facing issues with retention policies or message deletions in Teams, you might want to look into how retention policies work within your organization, as they can affect the visibility of messages and chats.

References:

• Messages in the Teams and Viva Engage apps are unexpectedly deleted by retention policies

Hi @Katie Halbert, 

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A forum.   

Thank you for contacting us. I understand how losing your draft group chats can be frustrating and time-consuming, so I’d like to explain why this happened and share the best way to resolve it quickly. 

In Microsoft Teams, a group chat is only created and saved once at least one message has been sent. If you added members but didn’t send any message, the chat remained as a local draft on your device. When you sign out, switch devices, clear cache, or after a period of inactivity, Teams automatically removes these unsent drafts. 

Unfortunately, Teams does not support recovering unsent drafts even if you log in via the web version. 

In this situation, here are some suggestions for next time to ensure you don’t lose the data you’ve created, which you may find helpful: 

• Always send a “placeholder” message immediately after creating a group chat, even if the main content will be sent later. 
• Pin newly created chats to keep them easily accessible. 
• Save member lists for each group (in CSV or Excel format) for future reuse. 
• If your goal is to mirror the organizational chart, sometimes Teams & Channels (which are better managed and stored) are more suitable than group chats (which are mainly for quick conversations and limited to 250 members per chat). 

I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and I hope the information provided proves helpful. 

If you’d like, you can share your experience with the product team to help improve the onboarding experience for future users in Microsoft Teams · Community. This is the most effective way to ensure your voice reaches the product team and can be considered for future improvements.  

Once you've submitted your feedback, feel free to share the link here in the comments. I’ll be happy to upvote it to help bring more visibility.  

Should you have any concerns or questions in the future, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Additionally, since many other users have expressed similar concerns but may not know where to submit feedback, if my response has helped you better understand the situation and guided you toward a possible next step, please mark it as the “Accepted Answer.” Your action will help pin this post to the top, making it easier for others in the community who are experiencing the same issue to find your feedback and support it.