Groups deleted when deleting a site or subsite

Question

Could anyone please inform me in which case(s) SharePoint groups will NOT be deleted when a site or subsite is deleted?

Answer 1

In my experience the OOTB behavior is that once a site is deleted the groups go with it. That is default behavior. However, I have to imagine that there are some third party tools that might be able to preserve the groups. Perhaps this can be done with STSADM?

Answer 2

You could somehow serialize or store the groups (Iterate through them somehow and build an XML file representing them to rebuild later on, for example) using a SPWebEventReceiver and extending WebDeleting.

Other than this, groups are deleted with SPWeb and SPSite objects.

Answer 3

OOTB when a site is deleted all the groups corresponding to that gets deleted. I think your question was mainly targeted towards inheritance of the Permissions of the Subsite from Parent. incase of subsite the groups created in below scenarios will get deleted.

-> if the subsite breaks the inheritance and adds its own groups
-> Setups the OOTB groups ( vistors , Members , Owners)