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Forum Discussion
Lost access to Dropbox Paper docs/folders
I lost access to a number of dropbox paper documents and folders after converting and then reverting my account from a personal account to a team account and back again (I then rejoined the team usin...
Thanks for the response Jay!
The files are not visible in my Dropbox folder, only when I visit paper.dropbox.com.
I believe this means I'm on the pre-2020 release of Dropbox Paper. Is that what you were asking?
Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHey stephenstephen, you are indeed correct about the version of Paper that you're using.
Are you able to share the documents themselves from your current team account to your personal one?
Thanks Hannah. Yes I can share them from my team account to my personal account and I have, however I would like to have ownership transferred back to my personal account for the following reasons:
- Several of these documents contain confidential information related to different businesses I've worked with and should not exist within the domain of the current team.
- Should I ever leave this team, I want to retain ownership of these documents and the team admin should not be granted access to/ownership of these files.
A Dropbox support representative previously helped me get ownership of some of these files transferred back, but I have since found additional files that were affected and I am having difficulty getting these transferred.
Maybe more significantly, I wanted to point out what I think is a serious privacy issue. In my case it was private business information that was shared, but for the sake of argumentation imagine the document contained private photos shared confidentially with a trusted partner.
My motivation for joining the team was an ability to collaborate on specific files and increased storage.
It was not clear to me that by joining the team I was also giving consent to the team administrator to access and, in the event that I left or was removed from the team, transferring ownership and revoking my own access to my private files that I had created from my personal dropbox account prior to joining the team.
My point is that this behavior has the potential to cause serious harm and at the very least I think stronger guardrails ought to be put in place.
- Hannah
Thanks for getting back to me, Stephen.
At the moment, you can share Paper docs between team and personal accounts, but you can't transfer doc ownership from a team account to a personal account.
I completely understand where you're coming from, though, and I can assure you that I have passed your feedback along to our team.
As a workaround right now, I would suggest creating new docs in your personal account and copying over the contents of the original ones, so that the personal account can be the owner of the new docs.
I hope this helps.
Thanks Hannah, I appreciate you passing along my concern.
In terms of resolving my specific issue, is there any possibility of following up on this conversation outside of a public forum?
Thankfully the affected parties are relatively understanding, but it is a serious issue that this confidential information was made available to individuals who should not have had access to it without my direct consent.
The workaround isn't entirely satisfactory since there are a large number of documents that would have to be copied and reshared.
As I mentioned, in the past, a representative successfully transferred ownership of a number of these documents from the team account to my personal account, but since receiving that support I've come across additional files that were missed in that original process.
I am currently the owner of (and can provide the links to) the remaining files that need to be transferred.
Thanks!
