Workspaces & Teams
Trash & restore
Deleting a form does not destroy it right away. It moves to Trash, where you can bring it back or delete it permanently. Trash is available on all plans.
What happens when you delete a form
Deleting a form is a soft delete — the form moves to Trash instead of being erased. When this happens, formbase:
- Stamps the form as trashed and removes it from your folders and dashboard counts.
- Revokes its active share links, so public URLs and embeds stop serving the form immediately.
- Cancels every pending request on that form. Recipients can no longer open their link, and the caller is told the request was canceled.
- Locks the form against editing, publishing, and duplicating while it sits in Trash.
Submissions and analytics collected so far stay attached to the form, so nothing is lost if you restore it. Canceled requests are the exception: a canceled request is final, and restoring the form does not bring it back. See Requests.
Deleting a folder skips Trash
Only forms go to Trash. Deleting a folder permanently deletes the folder, its subfolders, and every form inside them — there is nothing left to restore.
Opening Trash
Click Trash in the workspace sidebar to see every deleted form in the current workspace, with who deleted it and when.
Restoring a form
Select a form and choose Restore form. formbase asks where the form should go when it comes back out of Trash — pick a folder, or Home for the top level of the workspace — then brings it back with its submissions and analytics intact. Its share links stay revoked, and publishing again does not bring them back. Open the Share panel and click Re-activate on each link you want live again, or create a new link.
To restore several at once, check multiple forms and use the bulk Restore action in the toolbar — they all land in the folder you pick.
Deleting permanently
Choose Delete permanently to erase a form for good. This cascades — the form, its submissions, its analytics, and its uploaded files are all removed and cannot be recovered. You can permanently delete one form, select several and remove them in bulk, or use Empty trash to clear everything at once. Permanent deletion frees the form’s storage immediately: a form sitting in Trash still counts toward your storage quota until it is permanently deleted.
Permanent deletion is irreversible
There is no second trash. Once a form is permanently deleted, its submissions and analytics are gone for good. Export anything you want to keep first.
Automatic cleanup
Forms left in Trash are permanently deleted automatically after 30 days. A daily job removes anything past that window, so restore a form before then if you want to keep it.
Idle forms on the Free plan
On the Free plan, a form that has gone a full year with no edits and no new submissions is moved to Trash automatically. formbase emails the workspace owner a warning first, at least 30 days before it happens, so you have time to open the form or export it. Once trashed, it follows the same 30-day window as anything else here. Paid plans are never affected.