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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

I'd be really surprised if Dropbox didn't have a way to revert this (and to punish the Dropbox for Teams account creator, if identifiable).

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OP here - (in my story) the Teams account creator did not do this out of cruelty, they just didn't know this is what Dropbox does. I imagine very few people realize that this is how it works.

What should've happened is this: revoke my access to the team folder and downgrade my account back to Free. (Then, annoy me and refuse to sync until I go down to 2GB of usage.) That would be good design.

Reading the Dropbox help page, it seems like the situation might be worse if you were a paying customer: "If you convert your existing account to Teams, the balance you have remaining on your Pro subscription will be credited to the Teams subscription.". The language is pretty clear that an individual to Teams conversion is final, irrevocable.

That in itself is okay, but then the conversion mail should have come with big, red warning notices; not the bland email you seem to have received.

If you find a way around this, please post the link. I have the problem from the team side. I don't want to do any damage to anyone, but I don't want to share anymore either.

In the meantime you should make sure that people you're sharing Teams with create a fresh free Dropbox account for that purpose, not their personal one. If they really need some folders on their personal account too I guess they could share a folder or two with their personal account?

I can't imagine Dropbox can punish the Teams account creator for what amounts to their failure to educate users on the implication of the action. The victim does have to accept the invitation for this to work, so any unintended consequence of their action is due to lack of knowledge.

Revert this how?

Ann has an individual account. She joins a team. She leaves the team, and Bob (the team account owner) revokes her access. Dropbox deletes all her accounts.

What can dropbox do here; set Ann back as a member of that team? Bob (paying a lot of money) is not happy with that.

No, they just have to remove anns access to any team based information, same as she was prior to joining?

How do you do that? Once she joins the team, you have no way of knowing if something Ann created or modified belongs to the team or to her. This is the classic problem with "taint checking." Once you mix data across boundaries you have to assume it's tainted. I agree it's a crappy situation, but I can't see what Dropbox should change, other than make it very clear how this feature works to future customers. As a one-time thing, they could maybe get a PR win by helping this guy recover his data (if possible). However, that's not scalable, or a precedent they'd want to continue forward.

They can clearly delineate between team and personal accounts, force team storage to certain directories, and/or not allow users to manage team/personal accounts with the same login.

I was specifically responding to the previous comment, to explain why Dropbox can't simply revoke access to team storage files at this point (because they can't guarantee what constitutes team data). However, I'm in agreement with you that Dropbox could introduce new features to prevent this situation from happening in the first place, and had already noted as much in a different comment.

Dropbox doesn't delete the files, so none of this matters. They're only deleting the account, which revokes nothing but causes lots of problems. There is nothing hard to fix. Just switch it back to personal quota.

That makes no sense at all.

Dropbox could delete all data shared with the team from Ann's account. Then it could set Ann's account to read-only access until Ann deletes enough data to meet the new maximum size limit.

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