Changing ownership of entire folder structures (and content) is done via the ‘Content’ tab in the Admin area of the application.
Select the current owner, and drill down to the folder to change - not that you will not be able to do this if ownership is waterfall-inherited from a parent folder - you’ll have to change the parent
Select the new owner from the Collaborators list and change their role to ‘owner’
You will be warned that the process will remove ownership from the current owner. The process can take some time to complete (which is odd - I’d assume it was just a database update, but there we are).
One thing to watch for is that when I tried first time I was presented with an error message
The new owners account does not have enough space for the transfer
This is becuase the default for a new user is to have a storage constraint of 10Gb on their content. You have to edit the user record, and change their allocated storage to a larger value (or just tick the ‘unlimited’ box).
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Hello @Charles Verrier, welcome to the Box Community!
Thanks for sharing how to change folder ownership. This is very helpful for organizations in scenarios such as transferring projects between users, changes in roles or departments, departing employees, and more.
Sample image below shows how it appears from the admin’s perspective:
Regarding the process, large transfers may take some time as data is being migrated from one user to another. For high-volume transfers, it’s recommended to perform them at the end of the day to avoid disrupting users during working hours.
Additionally, for user accounts with limited storage, admins can increase it for managed users only. This is because they have access to managed users' account details within Admin Console, but not to external collaborators. To do this: go to Admin Console > Users & Groups tab > search and select the user > edit user account details.
Good morning, I hope you are well and I hope you can support me.
I have 2 business plus accounts currently contracted, in one of these accounts I have a folder to which I want to change the owner, in this case would be the account 2, what I did in account 1 was to add as a collaborator to account 2, my question is, am I doing right in adding first as a collaborator account 2 in account 1? and second, as I explain the case would not have problems to change the ownership of the folder to account 2, or what would be the pros and cons of making this process of transferring ownership from one account to another.
Are there any problems because of the size of the content in GB at the moment of making the change of ownership?
the folder I want to change the ownership weighs 1.3 TB
Hi @EYPM, welcome to the Box Community! I’ve moved your post to this related topic.
You’re on the right track. Changing folder ownership can be done by adding the collaborator to the target folder and then modifying their access level to “Owner” (e.g., Account 1 Folder owner invites Account 2 as a collaborator).
I assume you’re the admin of Account 1, so you can refer to the guide above on how to change ownership via Content Manager.
Note: Content Manager is available in the Admin Console with Business Plus or higher plans.
A few important reminders before performing these steps:
Files and folders owned by the user are inaccessible while they are being transferred. This means that during the move, any shared content owned by the user is inaccessible to all collaborators, thus we recommend performing the transfer after business hours.
The process of transferring content can take some time to complete, depending on the amount of content your user owns. The more content you own, the longer it may take to complete.
Box does not perform transfers as one single action. Instead, Box chunks a transfer into smaller pieces and then schedules each piece of work separately. As a result, portions of the folder tree display gradually at the destination, until the entire transfer completes. If the current owner has a large amount of content to transfer, we recommend performing the transfer after business hours.