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Team Admin deleted my account

I have had my Dropbox account since 2011. It was my personal storage vault for all my pictures and documents.

Later down the road, in 2016, I am invited to my work's shared business folder. When I left the company last month, the admin I assumed attempted to remove me from the shared business folder. I log in today to find that my Dropbox account is completely brand new with not a single file on it. I chatted in and was told that my previous admin may have possibly deleted my whole personal account.

First of all, if true, it's extremely upsetting to know that Dropbox allows someone to completely delete your own personal account without any confirmation or notification to the owner.

Secondly, is there any way to retrieve my personal account?

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Comments

Jay

Hi @imTatsu, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

When you join and merge your account with a Dropbox Business team, at that point, the team admin technically owns your account and all files on it, as it is no longer a personal account.

If it has been less than 7 days since the deletion, you can ask the to reactivate your account, and then convert it to a personal plan away from the team.

Keep me updated with any progress!

imTatsu

What if it has been more than 7 days?

Jay

If this is the case, then it is no longer possible to recover the account from the team. The email address used for your account should be free now to create a new, empty, Dropbox account.

However, the files should still exist on the Dropbox Business team, and the admin can transfer the files to another team member, or themselves. You could ask them to do this and share a folder or link to you so that you can download your files.

Datelight

I just wanted to upload files to my company's project folder like I always do, but for some reason, I had to go through the signup process using my current account email and ended up with an empty account without my personal files or access to my company's cloud.
Why was my account wiped out and how can I get access to the previous state of my account?

Rich

@Datelight wrote:
... I had to go through the signup process using my current account email and ended up with an empty account without my personal files or access to my company's cloud.

Were you a member of a Business team account? If so, the team admin may have removed you from the team. Reach out to the team admin and see if that's the case, and if it is, you can ask them to restore the account. Act quickly, however, as they only have seven days to restore the account.

Once the account is restored, if their intent is to remove you and you want to keep your account active, they'll need to convert it to an individual account.

Datelight

As it turns out, yes, they unlinked my account from their corporate one causing mine to be completely empty now.
I'll try to recover the account or files if it's still possible.
Thank you very much, Rich

Megan

If you need anything else, we'll always be one post away @Datelight!