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Deleting a shared folder with no owner

Hi all,

A few years ago my kids school setup a series of Dropbox folders and added the parents so we could view school work during lockdown, a good idea at the time but as they didn't ask the parents if they could share our email address with others this would be a breach of GDPR.

Having spoken to the school it appears the teacher who set this up has now left, the school tried to remove the folder but failed miserably (long story!) and we are now left with no folder owner (2 members have edit access) and what appears to be no way to remove it.

Does anyone have any ideas on how the whole lot can be deleted?

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Здравко

@Mick_C wrote:
...
Does anyone have any ideas on how the whole lot can be deleted?

Yes, the owner is not needed to remove yourself from the shared folder. The easiest way is to just delete that folder in spite your email will left there. A bit more complicated way is to unshare the folder. Navigate to your shared folder first. On top right part of the folder view is a share button (together with participants list):

Clicking on this button will lead you to dialog box for managing the share:

Here you can select "Who can access" and get in the view where you can see all participants and manage your own participation. Something like:

After clicking on dropdown menu header and selecting "Remove my access" here will remove your participation to the folder (together with your email) and wipe its content out of your account. 😉 Exactly what you looked for.

Hope this helps.

Mick_C

Hiya, many thanks for the idea and apologies for the delay in my reply.

I am aware of this option but it doesn't solve the issue for everyone else listed as members of the share as they would need to be told what to do, there's a big part of me that wants to email them all and say "Hey, the school screwed up and you need to do this .... " but part of me doesn't want to make any more noise than necessary.

Can anything be done with the 2 members who have edit access? I don't know what their options would be in terms of admin over the group and folders?

Mark

Hi @Mick_C

Unfortunately, nobody but the owner can delete it. However, if you have edit access you could, in theory, delete everything within it - it wouldnt delete permanently but it would remove it from the share and everybodys account. THEN you could leave it. To everybody else they'd then just have an empty folder in their Dropbox.

Mick_C

Thanks Mark, I've managed to get in touch with one of the edit access users, I'll get them to give it a try and see what we get. Out of interest, can an edit access user change the access levels of other users?

Здравко

@Mick_C wrote:
... Out of interest, can an edit access user change the access levels of other users?

No, only the owner and every user for herself/himself. What Mark advised will remove the content, but not the emails - just keep in mind!

Good luck.