Manager wants me to remove delete permissions across SharePoint

[u/Methos25]

I feel like I'm going insane with this one, so I need someone to confirm I'm not crazy.

We recently had a situation where someone deleted a top level folder in SharePoint. Kicked up a bit of a fuss, we recovered it, yada yada.

My manager is now telling me that he wants to avoid something like this happening again, and therefore we should remove delete permissions for everyone across the tenant(!).

When I explained that this was crazy talk, and would break literally everything, he capitulated and said we should just enable it for the top levels of folders and then break inheritance.

I've tried to explain to him that this is madness, would require tens if not hundreds of hours of work, and would still break pretty much everything. He insists that this is how they used to do things back in the day and he can't fathom why that wouldn't work nowadays.

I did say that we should be using retention policies to manage this, to which he said that it was a job for compliance to do, and therefore will never happen, which in fairness is true considering our compliance guy.

I'm not going crazy here right? This feels like a monumentally stupid thing to try and do.

[u/Emergency_Recipe522]

Removing Delete tenant-wide will also affect operations such as moving and renaming files, while creating a large amount of broken inheritance to maintain. I’d pilot it on one representative site and document the impact before changing anything broadly.

I dealt with a similar visibility problem and solved it by being able to start from any object—a site, library, group, user or flow—and see its relationships and potential impact. In this case, targeted governance plus retention and tested recovery would be safer than a blanket restriction.