What happens if I join a Dropbox team with my account that has an Essentials subscription?

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Annelien wrote:

I have a dropbox essentials plan. My company has a dropbox business plan and wants to add my account to it. Is this possible? If yes, what will change? 

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First important part first. If you join the Business team with your existing account, you will merge your account into the team account, effectively making them the owner of your account, along with the ability of the team admin to access everything currently in your account.

Ok, now that that's out of the way...

When invited to join a Business team account you'll have two options; join with your existing account, or keep the accounts separate with a new account. If you decide to join with your existing account, it will be merged into the team account. You'll receive a pro-rated refund for the time remaining on your subscription, and from that point on you'll use one of the team licenses. Your current files will remain separate from the team, but the admin has the ability to sign in to any account as the user, so technically would have access to your existing files if they chose to.

Second important part. If the team admin decides to remove you from the team, your account is deleted. In order to leave or be removed from a team while keeping the account active it must be converted back to an individual account. If they don't do this and you're removed from the team, the account is deleted (with the option of transferring your files to another member) and the team admin would have just seven days to restore the account if needed.

If you don't want to merge your account, you'll want to join the team with a new account. I'd suggest doing so with your company email address, to keep things separate. If you choose to go this route, I'd suggest having the team admin invite your company email address to join the team, that way your work email is in the work Dropbox account. If that email is already on your personal account, change it to a personal email address first.

If they've already invited you to the address that's on your personal account and you chose to keep things separate, choosing the option to keep the account separate will create a new account that your personal files will be moved to, and you'll still join the team with your existing account.

• https://help.dropbox.com/account-access/user-joins-team

I would strongly suggest keeping the accounts separate if your existing account doesn't contain work files. If needed, you can link your personal and team accounts so they'll both still sync to your computer.