How to safely remove shared folder from hard drive, owned by a student who graduated and left

I am a professor at University of Florida (I need to use my personal email here, it never worked with UF email). All my graduate students and I all use Dropbox. Each student has a project folder shared with me, so that when they graduate I have access to the files for future use. Now, if a new student comes, and I pass the previous student computer to him/her, the project folder is still in the computer. How can we safely remove that shared folder from the hard drive and keep them on the web (and my computer)? The old student UF account is disabled so the files cannot be made online only by the old student (and he left anyways). I can access the folder on that pc with my UF account. I can delete the folders manually, which should be safe since in my UF account my dropbox folder is synced, not theirs. But would would happen if the old student decides to come back to work for me as a post doc (or it was a master student who wanna work as a Phd student) some time in the future, their UF account is reactivated, and the PC is given back to them? would the project folder be lost?

Dropbox Plan
( Enterprise)
Device
(Dell)
Operating System/Browser (if using the web)
(Windows 11.)