If you are managing a Google Form survey and you accidentally delete a respondent’s submission from the “Responses” tab, you will quickly notice a glaring problem: Google Forms does not have a native “Undo” button or a built-in Trash folder for individual responses. Once a response is deleted from the form’s dashboard, it appears to be gone forever.
However, if your Google Form was linked to a Google Sheet to record data (which is a standard best practice), the deleted data is not actually lost. The deletion only affects the visual dashboard within the Forms app; the raw data remains safely recorded in the spreadsheet’s version history.
How to Recover the Deleted Response Data
To recover the lost information, you must access the linked Google Sheet.
- Open your Google Form in edit mode.
- Click on the Responses tab at the top of the form.
- Look for the green View in Sheets icon in the top right corner of the responses section and click it. This will open the spreadsheet containing all your survey data.
- In the Google Sheet, look at the top menu bar and click on File, then hover over Version history, and select See version history.
- A panel will slide out on the right side of the screen displaying every previous version of the spreadsheet, organised by date and time.
- Click on a version from before the moment you accidentally deleted the response.
- The spreadsheet will preview that older version, and the deleted response data will reappear in the rows.
How to Restore the Data
You now have two choices. You can either restore the entire spreadsheet to this previous point in time, or simply copy the specific deleted data.
Option 1: Full Restore
If you have not received any new survey responses since the accidental deletion, you can simply click the green Restore this version button at the top of the screen. This will revert the entire spreadsheet back to its complete state.
Option 2: Copy and Paste
If you have received new responses since the deletion, restoring the whole sheet will erase the new data. Instead, simply highlight the specific row containing the recovered data, press Ctrl + C to copy it, exit the version history viewer, scroll to the bottom of your live spreadsheet, and press Ctrl + V to paste the lost data back into the active database.