Setup and use of Soft Deletions in Notes/Domino

How are Soft Deletions set up and used in IBM® Lotus Notes® and Lotus Domino®?

The Soft Deletions feature in Notes/Domino allows for the recovery of deleted documents for a period of time defined by the user. In order to correctly use this feature, some setup is required:
1. On the Advanced tab of the Database Properties (select File > Database > Properties), select the 'Allow Soft Deletions' checkbox.
2. In the Advanced tab of Database Properties, fill in an hour value in the space after '$Undelete Expire Time (in hours)'; this represents the period of time a soft deletion will be valid for recovery.

Once these selections are made, deleted documents will be available for recovery until they expire. In Notes/Domino 6.0 and later, soft deleted documents will appear in the Trash folder, but for other databases you would need to create a view to display and/or recover the soft deletions.

How to create a view to display, and optionally recover, soft deleted documents (useful for custom applications, other non-mail templates, and pre-6.0 mail templates):

1. Open Domino Designer and open the database.
2. From the main menu, select Create > View.
3. In 'View Name' type the desired name (you may call this view anything you wish).
4. In 'View Type' select 'Shared, Contains Deleted Documents' from the drop-down box. This creates a view in the database that allows a user to see all soft-deleted documents. You can now access soft-deleted documents.
5. In order to restore these documents, create an Action or SmartIcon or button or agent that contains the command, @UndeleteDocument. This removes the soft deleted status of a document that has been soft deleted.

Supporting Information:

For Notes/Domino 5.x mail templates: The mail template already contains a hidden view, $SoftDeletions, that is set up to restore (@UndeleteDocument) or permanently delete the documents. If you (Administrator) want to make this view available to your users, unhide it; that is, remove the parentheses around the view name and the prepended $. Or give the view an entirely different name of your choice.

Note: When a mail template has an Online Disk Structure (ODS) of 20 (which corresponds to Domino R5 format) you cannot create a soft deletions view because the view type, "Shared, Contains Deleted Documents" is not available when creating views in an ODS 20 database.

For more information on Soft Deletions, refer to the Domino Designer Help database and the related documents cited below.

Also refer to the document "Enabling Soft Deletions Results in Database Corruption - Typically in Mail Files" (#1090549) for information on a possible corruption issue that can occur when enabling soft deletions.
Note: This issue is specific to Domino releases 5.0.5 through 5.0.8.