When attempting to transfer ownership of a folder to another user, you may receive the error "There was a problem while trying to transfer item ownership to {email}."
Common Causes
The error typically occurs as the transfer was blocked by enterprise settings configured by the Box Admin. Please reach out to the Box Admin to see if any of the following settings are enabled.
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Restrict content creation:
- If this setting is enabled, admins (the main admin and co-admins with Manage Users or Manage Groups privilege) can transfer ownership of folders to managed users, but managed users cannot transfer ownership to others.
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Retention Policy / Legal Hold:
- You cannot transfer the ownership of a file or folder with a retention policy to an external user.
- For a relatively large folder (50 files or more), you cannot transfer the ownership to an external user regardless of whether any of the policies actually apply to the contents under that folder.
The Box admin can try the followings for each of the scenarios:
- Restrict content creation - Box Admin or Co-admin with access to Content Manager can perform the ownership transfer through Content Manager on behalf of the managed user.
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Retention Policy / Legal Hold - Files/folders under retention cannot be moved to an external user. In case transfer of a folder to an external user is blocked even though it doesn't contain files/folders that are under retention, you can try perform the transfer in a smaller chunk (less than 50 files at a time). If this does not work, please open up a case with our support team and provide the following information:
- Current owner
- New owner
- Folder ID
- Network capture while attempting transfer