Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
Forum Discussion
a_rabatin
3 years agoExplorer | Level 3
Cannot delete or move top level folder as admin (folder used to belong to deleted user)
I have some folders in the admin area that I want to remove or delete - but even though I am logged in as admin, there is no menu function available.
I 'shared' the folders with me but it also did not help.
There is simpy no context menu to operate on the folders (just the 'manage' option for sharing).
I am the admin in a team.
I saw a lot of notes here that looked similar but was not able to use any of the other recommendations successfully.
Anyone any idea?
6 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- Hannah3 years ago
Dropbox Community Moderator
Thanks for the update here, Arthur!
In any case, I'm glad that the issue was resolved and you were able to delete the folders you wanted.
If you do come across any other issues, let us know and we'll be happy to help.
Have a great weekend!
- a_rabatin3 years agoExplorer | Level 3
The problem seems to have fixed itself in a very strange way.
I had a duplicated folder in my own dropbox with the same name as the top level folder in the admin section. I deleted that.
When I checked this morning, I can see the 2 top level folders I wanted deleted are gone - but only one of those showed up under the 'Deleted' section.
I suspect what has been happening is as follows:
- When I set up the additional account somehow the personal dropbox folder and the team folders got wrongly marked in dropbox, creating these orphan folders
- Whilst I tried to remove the user and these top level folders, I had a lot of other changes in filestructure happening in the background, such as large re-syncs. Although I did not see any active jobs on the server dashboard, it seems to me somehow the changes on the server are queued and the deletions could not be executed as dropbox was waiting for other processes to finish.
I have seen quite a few meaningless error messages ('I cannot execute ...' or 'Failure in ...') which indicates to me that Dropbox does struggle with a lot of parallel changes happening to the files.
But it does make sense that all changes need to be properly queued.
Anyway, the problem is now fixed. In future I will be more careful making changes to the file structure.
I know that keeping the files in sync is not trivial, but I think Dropbox needs a better monitoring dashboard for whats happening in the account so I can see where my changes are.
Thanks for your prompt help and reply in the forum
Arthur - Hannah3 years ago
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hey a_rabatin, sorry to jump in.
Where are you trying this from? The All files page?
Can you try from the Content tab in your admin console instead and let me know what options you see there?
- a_rabatin3 years agoExplorer | Level 3
One more thing ... the folders I have problems with are marked as 'Shared Folders' not Team folders.
But although I (as admin) are also the owner of these, I cannot delete them or even look whats inside them
- a_rabatin3 years agoExplorer | Level 3
Hello, this is what it looks like. Also when I select the folder with the tickbox, I do *not* get any options (Rename, Move etc)
These folders were by a user that I deleted, and yes, I followed the steps to transfer ownership to my account. I am also the admin (This is from the Admin contents view).
The problem was there before though - these were somewhat orphaned folders. I thought it would get cleaned up when I delete the user.Thank you for your help
- Nancy3 years ago
Dropbox Community Moderator
Thanks for posting here, a_rabatin!
Can you send me one extra screenshot of the options you see when clicking on the button with the 3 dots next to your folders?
Also, were the deleted user’s files transferred with these steps, by any chance?
Let me know what you find, and we can look into this.
About Delete, edit, and organize
Solve issues with deleting, editing, and organizing files and folders in your Dropbox account with support from the Dropbox Community.
The Dropbox Community team is active from Monday to Friday. We try to respond to you as soon as we can, usually within 2 hours.
If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X, Facebook or Instagram.
For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.
If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!