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Removing Account Access without deleting data

Admins can easily remove a team member from a Dropbox team account without deleting their Dropbox data, although, they will lose access to any team folders that were shared as part of that account. Explore more in our helpful video guide.

Remove team account access without deleting data

We look at the scenario where we want to remove a member of our team. But that member may have actually had an account before they joined our Dropbox team. So, for example, maybe it's a freelancer, maybe it's a contractor; they had a free or maybe even a paid Dropbox account.

And what we had done is we had gone through the process of inviting them to that team, and they had joined our team, but now let's say that project is over, and what we want to do is remove that user's account from Dropbox, from our Dropbox team. I say, but what we don't want to do is we don't want to actually delete that account because, again, they had an existing account before they actually joined our team.

So I'm gonna, I mean, logged into the admin console, as an administrator for my Dropbox team, and I'm gonna search for that particular user that I want to remove from the team.

And you can see them here, individual freelancer account. Their current status is a member. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to go ahead and click on the little gear icon. I'm actually gonna go down to delete member. And I'm gonna select that, but what we don't actually do is we don't necessarily want to delete that account. As you can see here, I'm getting a note saying that this user actually had an account from before joining the Dropbox team. And what I also have is an option at the bottom left-hand side that we're interested in, which says convert to an individual Dropbox account instead.

So I'm gonna go ahead and click that. And what that's gonna do is tell me, okay, this is what's gonna actually happen. It's gonna be disconnected from the team. There are any team shares will be unshared. And they won't have access basically to anything the team folders. But what they will have access to is files and folders that they had before joining the team that they still have ownership of. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna say, Convert account. And that should just take a few minutes.

Okay. Great. So now we've converted that account to a Dropbox basic account, and that user can carry on as they normally would before they had joined the Dropbox team.

Okay. So let's flip over to see what that looks like for that individual user's account.

So now I've automatically been signed out because now I'm no longer part of a team, and I'm back to my individual account.

So I'm gonna go ahead and sign in. And what they should actually notice now is that they should no longer see any of those team folders or system folders that they had access to when they were actually part of the team. But we should still see all of the files and folders that I had before I joined the DBX group team, as well as anything that I currently have ownership of as well.

So you can see here I still have all my existing folders, and the files within those are intact as well. And now I'm back to an individual account, but I no longer have access to the particular files and folders that I had when I was part of that Dropbox DBX group team.

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