Cleaning up old user data - specifically removing collaborators
So I have an ever growing problem that is part of the off shoot of the fact that I can't just delete users any more and let their data die with them if I so choose. I can only delete them and assign an account to own them.
In this case, that account is mine.
What I DID NOT realize is that all of the sharing and collaboration on any sub-folders that previous person owned remain in tact. So all kinds of users and collaborators are just willy nilly continuing to update files as if the previous owner never left.
Is there a way to just remove all collaboration all at once from the top level folder that is named something like "username@noctrl.edu - user names files and folders" so that people will actually reach out and say "hey, I lost a thing" help me get it back? Other than me wading through folders, sub folders, sub sub folders, etc. trying to find any that are shared and removing one at a time?
I obviously could just delete the entire folder, but I'm guessing there is stuff that people want that was "left behind".
Please let me know your thoughts.
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Hi trflesher,
Welcome to the Box Community!
This appears to be the expected behavior if you opt to transfer the ownership of the content owned by the previous employee to another account. You can manually removed collaborators in the folder or delete the content since collaboration is not preserved when an account is deleted.
We have seen other organizations facing the same problem and as a workaround, what they do is create a repository account where Admins can transfer the contents of those employees leaving the organization instead of taking ownership every time they have to delete users .
I hope this information helps. Thanks for posting and for your participation in the forum!
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Thank you, France. I understand and agree with all the things you just said; however, my actual question was if there was some automated way to remove all the collaboration from the folder and sub-folder ... otherwise I have to go digging through folder by folder by sub-folder to see what might be shared and remove each. Is there a way through a setting or a tool to remove any collaboration in the top level folder of the deleted user data on down??
While I understand the repository account, that doesn't really help clean up or change / assign proper ownership of data, it just moves the problem so it can't be seen.
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Hi trflesher,
This might be possible via Box API.
I recommend posting your asks on our Platform and Developer forum, our members and experts might be able to provide some examples and more details on how to achieve this goal via Box API.
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