Deletion of files within a folder whose owner was changed and the original owner's acc was deleted

[lara_egf]

Hello,
I represent a laboratory within a university institution. The laboratory's email was only recently created by the university. Previously, institutional emails of team members were used. We had various folders with files from different owners, and it would be impossible to change the owner of each file to this new email. Therefore, we decided to only change the owner of the folder. Recently, a team member's account was deleted, and all files were also deleted, leaving only empty folders. Even the files that did not belong to the deleted account disappeared. I cannot recover the deleted account as I am part of the university institution and don't have an admin account, but I want to recover the deleted files.
How can I proceed? Is this possibility available?

[icrew · Accepted solution]

Two replies:

1) Contact your university’s IT helpdesk. They can help, especially if it’s been less than 20 days since the account was deleted.

2) See my reply to the thread at https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Workspace-Q-A/Deleted-workspace-account-lost-files-on-other-... for why this happened and how to find the missing files owned by users who weren’t deleted. 

Hope that helps,

Ian