Admins: How to delete a member from a Dropbox team

Updated Aug 27, 2024

The information in this article applies to certain types of admins on Dropbox team accounts.

If someone leaves your organization, an admin can either:

Suspend team members for a period of time.
Deactivate and delete team members entirely.
Convert a team member's account to an individual account.

Note: If you want to place a legal hold on a member of your team, you must create the legal hold before you delete the member. You can’t place legal holds on deleted team members.

How to delete a Dropbox team member

You can deactivate users in your team by deleting their account. Deleted team members immediately lose access to their Dropbox team account, along with all files, folders, and Paper docs. After deleting a team member, admins can choose to reuse that license and invite another person to the team.

To delete a team member:

Log in to dropbox.com with your admin credentials.
Click Admin console.
Click Members in the left sidebar.
Click the “…” (ellipsis) next to the name of the person you want to remove.
Select Delete.
Choose when to transfer this member’s file content to another team member and whether to delete content from this member’s devices next time they come online.
- Under Do you want to transfer this member’s file content to another team member?, select either Transfer now or Transfer later. If you select Transfer now, enter the recipient’s name or email address.
- Under Do you want to delete content from this member’s devices next time they come online?, select Yes or No.
Click Continue.
Review the Delete account completely screen to confirm selection.
Click Delete account.

What happens when I delete a team member?

When you delete a team member's account, several things happen:

The team member loses access to the account, including all files and Paper docs.
Shared links with view access created by the team member are deleted, unless they’re web-based files, like Paper or Google docs.
Shared links with edit access created by the team member remain active.
Dropbox stops syncing files to the team member's computers and mobile devices.
The team member receives an email notifying them that an admin deleted their account and that they no longer have access.

Note: The team member won’t be able to create another Dropbox account with the same email address for 7 days after deletion. However, if the member's file content is transferred to another team member during deletion, the same email address can be used immediately.

Important: Dropbox is moving to an updated shared link architecture where links are based on content rather than on users. This will affect how links are created and shared. The new links can be identified by the presence of an ‘rlkey’ parameter in the URL. For these links, the above behavior will perform differently:

Any links created by a deleted team member will remain active if the underlying content isn't deleted, such as content in shared team folders.
External partners can only access files or folders that have Who has access set to Anyone with link in the shared link settings for that file or folder.

Can I delete my own account?

As the admin of a Dropbox team account you can't remove your own account from the team. Instead, you need to make another member of your team an admin, and then have the new admin remove your account.