This is one of the rare occurrence but one may come across this scenario. Once a VSTS account is deleted, Microsoft keeps it for 30 days (although in a deactivated state). So it is possible to recover the deleted account during those 30 days.

In this blog post, we’ll learn the steps required to restore a deleted VSTS account.  For this post’s purpose, I’ll delete my personal VSTS account i.e. mohitgoyal.visualstudio.com. Only a VSTS admin can delete the VSTS account. Since I am the owner of the account, so I have this privilege.

In the handsight, we’ll also know how to delete the VSTS account 😉

Delete the VSTS account

To delete the account, we need to go to account settings -> settings and then click the delete button. It will inform us that the account would be available for next 30 days to recover and ask us to confirm the same:

Once the account is deleted, you would be redirected to a nice 404 error page:

Restore the deleted VSTS account

First, we need to sign in to our Visual Studio profile. It will ask to confirm us the identity and once we are done, we need to go to the “Accounts Pending Deletion” section at the bottom of our profile page. There we will see a link to restore the deleted account:

We need to simply click restore in front of the deleted account. Again a pop up box will ask us to confirm the same. After few minutes, our account would be restored will all its data and settings intact:

It is to be noted that billing process breaks once the account is deleted and restored. You can set it up again by linking it to an azure subscription.