When someone is leaving your organization, there are a few steps you should follow before you delete their account. To prevent the loss of important data, you will need to make sure that the deletion process won’t result in the deletion of all the folders owned by the user.
In a nutshell
To ensure that all company documents remain intact, you will need to re-assign the user’s folders – either to yourself or to another trusted user. You can do that with the user’s collaboration or by performing a takeover as part of the user deletion.
Preventing data loss without Advanced Control
In case you haven't enabled Advanced Control or it is not available in your subscription you need to collaborate with the user to avoid data loss. As a first step, you will need to review if there are any folders owned by the user. You can find this information on the Users tab of your Admin Center.
- Head to your Admin Center.
- Navigate to the
Users tab. - Click on the user’s name.
- Navigate to the
Folders tab.
With the list of folders in hand you can revise the data with the user and decide upon the proper next steps.
Takeover with enabled Advanced Control
In some cases, you will need to complete the off-boarding process of a user. As a Subscription Owner or as a Co-Owner you can perform an account takeover from the Admin Center. This action requires that Advanced Control is switched on and the policy changes are accepted.
- Navigate to the Users tab.
- Hover over the user.
- Click the
gear icon on the right. - Click Delete.
-
You can check the folders, which are owned by the user. In case you wish to avoid the deletion of the data choose Transfer contents to and name a subscription member to whom the data will be transferred. It can be any subscription member who already accepted the Advanced Control. If you don't wont to keep any of the data, choose Delete content.
📝 Note: Alternatively, if you wish to allow the user to keep their access right to the data you can choose Remove from subscription but in that case you have no longer control over the activity of the user.
- Click Continue.
- You will see a summary page, if you agree to continue click Delete account.
- To confirm the irreversible account deletion you'll be prompted to type in your password.
- If any of the folders couldn't be transferred, you can click on Try again.
Both the previous owner and the one who inherited the data will receive an email notification about the transfer.
The new owner of the folders will see them listed under the Transferred section, where the name of the previous owner will also be visible.
Next-gen folders
The transfer of next-gen folders are supported. If the receiving user was already invited to a subfolder of the next-gen folder they will see a summary about the permission changes.
Shared links
The shared links and file requests, which were created by the deleted user, will remain active, but still the creator of the shared link will be displayed on the download and upload pages. In case you wish to display here currently active users new links and requests should be created.
Also, please review the Shared links tab of the user’s account if you have Auto-deletion for shared links policy set. Find this via desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux) or the Web Access easily: Shared links > Folder column > Stored temporarily.
If the Auto-deletion policy is set, files shared via this policy will not be available in any of the folders (not even via the special Other uploads folder); and will get deleted 90 days after the link becomes inactive. Save these files, if you need to keep them.
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