Restore Folder from Trash bigger than free space

Hi ​@snagypeter, 

Welcome to Box Community, and we’ll assist in regards to restoring your deleted folder. 

When restoring a folder from trash in Box, the system typically needs to verify available quota before completing the restore. If the folder (30GB) exceeds your remaining free space (13GB), the restore will be blocked or fail.

Here are the things that you can do with your current available space: 

1. Free up your space by deleting unnecessary contents. 
2. Instead of restoring the entirety of 30GB, only restore select folders. 
3. Lastly, it’s still best if you would consider increasing your available space. To do so, you can reach out to our Sales Team via box.com/pricing. 

Hope it helps! Let us know in the Community if you have additional questions. 

I deleted a single folder at once. There is no way to restore it partially since only one folder is in the trash.

However, the used space was somehow released after about an hour. This contradicts the statement that trash also counts as used space.

It’s confusing. I was about to close my account...

The folder's reported size (30GB) isn't necessarily the amount of additional disk space needed to restore it. It depends on how the backup, recycle bin, snapshots, hard links, compression, or deduplication are handled. However, if restoring would require creating a separate copy of the data, the system needs enough free space to write those files, which is why 13GB free may not be sufficient.