An admin can manage user offboarding and the content of a user in a 'Pending offboarding' state for a defined time period within the Deleted User Retention policy. After the lapse of this defined time period, all of the user's folders, files, and shared links are deleted and can no longer be accessed.
Policy rules
- By default, this policy is enabled.
- Stored files or folders of a deleted user continue to be included as part of your company quota/storage usage.
- Folders shared with the deleted user by internal and external users are deleted from the deleted user's account.
- Folders owned by the deleted user and shared with internal or external users are removed from those users' accounts.
- Shared links, that belong to outgoing files and folders, are disabled and are deleted.
- The Purge policy is not applied to these files or folders until the user's offboarding configured time period ends or unless the ownership is changed; when the time period expires, all data associated with user is automatically purged.
Use Case
In order to offboard a user or to free up licenses, admins will delete individual user accounts or perform bulk deletion. The admin will later realize the deleted content contained important or sensitive information. Since the account was deleted, the admin had no way to recover the data nor reassign shared folders to others. To avoid this, admins can change the settings within the Deleted User Retention policy that allow the user's content to be retained for a specified amount of time prior to deletion.
Procedures
Retain a deleted user's content
To retain a deleted user's content for a specified time, perform the following:
- Select Settings → Deleted User Retention policy.
- Select Enabled and define the number of days for which the deleted user's content will be retained. During this configured time period the deleted user's status will display as Pending offboarding.
- Minimum value: 30 days (default)
- Maximum value: 90 days
- Specify the email addresses of who will be notified that this policy is enabled.
Once this policy is enabled and an admin attempts to delete a user's account ( Tasks → Delete Account), the admin receives a warning regarding the implications of deleting the user.
Change folder ownership or restore participants of shared folders
To change the ownership of folders and/or restore participants of shared folders, perform the following:
- From Manage Users select the Manage user offboarding task.
- Select or enter the email address of the person who will be the new owner. The new owner can copy content from these folders until the configured time period for offboarding expires.
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When the user was deleted, the participants no longer had access to the folders. To restore the participants for all folders, click Restore participants of Shared Folders.
Change ownership of an individual folder
To change the ownership of an individual folder, from Manage Users select the Manage folders.
