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Let's say a user deletes few items from a document library. Is there a way we can find out the user name of the person who deleted those. I looked into alerts which does let one know which item was deleted but not by whom.

One thing I thought of is to create a custom event receiver, so when an item is deleted I can grab the item name but is there any property of the item that stores the user who deleted that item? When some one deletes an item does the Modified By name change to the person who deleted it? Any suggestions with regards with a different approach?

EDIT: I missed few key things in the question. We would want to create a feature that will send an email entailing which items were deleted and who deleted them. As i was thinking, if we went with the custom event receiver solution we can capture the person who logged in and deem him as the person who deleted the item. I guess it probably answer's my question. But if any other better approach to handle this please let me know if not i will close this question.

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  • Enable auditing.
    – user13408
    Commented Nov 25, 2015 at 17:40
  • Yash, I believe your edit did not help to improve the clarity of the question
    – SandeshR
    Commented Nov 27, 2015 at 17:49

2 Answers 2

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First, look in the site's Recycle Bin. If it truly was a delete, it should be there (be sure to use a site collection admin account to check).

Next, look in the Site Collection Recycle Bin. Items removed from a site's recycle bin get moved to the site collection recycle bin.

Both of these options display the name of the "Deleted by" person.

Barring that, you have to start digging in logfiles. Depending upon your logging level in SharePoint, you may be able to find the event in the SharePoint Logs.

IIS logs are also available, but difficult to sift through. You may find the POST or GET request for the delete operation in there.

The proper way to determine this in the future is to enable Auditing on your site. You can choose which events to audit. I suggest you turn this on for this particular site immediately if delete operations need to be tracked. be careful - auditing takes up a LOT of storage.

Good Luck!

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  • Thanks for the reply Kolten. Sorry for the confusion cause, I have clarified my question little better.
    – SandeshR
    Commented Nov 25, 2015 at 17:06
  • Oh I see - well a workflow could work. Although you can't initiate a workflow on a Delete operation, you CAN initiate a delete operation inside a workflow. see here: blogs.sharepoint911.com/blogs/jennifer/Lists/Posts/…
    – Kolten
    Commented Nov 25, 2015 at 17:12
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    I think a mix of auditing and the recycle bin would work here. This seems like an odd process. If it is a real concern that users dont delete things in this particular space, create a custom permission level so they can't delete items.
    – Eric Alexander
    Commented Nov 25, 2015 at 18:22
  • Thanks Eric, Yes creating custom permission level(no delete) can we a good solution
    – SandeshR
    Commented Nov 25, 2015 at 19:16
  • @Eric..The users do need to have permissions to edit and delete the items in a list. Few months ago someone in the site deleted an item. But it was not known who did it. So we need a solution that will let us know who delete what item
    – SandeshR
    Commented Nov 27, 2015 at 17:54
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You can enable auditing in SharePoint. It`s available in site collection settings.Then you can access audit log report being a site collection admin.

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    Thanks Navoneel, Seems like an option but this might cause overhead with space
    – SandeshR
    Commented Nov 25, 2015 at 19:14

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