How the owner of a team Dropbox account can destroy your Dropbox account

From the translator: I quote the translation of the story of one person who nearly lost his Dropbox account only because he accepted the invitation from the team account. Designed as a post, and not as a translation because The author is not exactly known.

Algorithm of actions in order to destroy someone's account

Create a team account on Dropbox. It will cost you $ 795 .
1. Invite your foe who uses Dropbox to your team. This does not mean that he will immediately agree, but the proposal is quite tempting. 1TB of space (not only for your folders, but for all its files).
2. After he agrees, cancel his access to the command space. This will completely remove his Dropbox account (and not just the “command” files).

Now the story

In the summer I worked for one start-up company, and its employees used a team account of Dropbox. I already had a free Dropbox account, which I used to study and several personal projects. For myself, I needed no more than 2GB, but I had several shared folders for personal projects, and for study there were read-only public folders, links to which I gave to several of my fellow students.
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When I started working for this company, they added me to their Dropbox “team”, and this (although it was a prerequisite of work) was great, because I could get a lot of personal space - it's a whole 1TB for which I don’t have to pay. Of course, I did not mind that it will be added to my “standard” account.

At the end of the summer, I ended up working with them, and yesterday they removed me from their Dropbox “team”. It is reasonable, because they did not have any sense in paying Dropbox for my 1TB.

However, it is unreasonable that Dropbox deleted my account immediately after it happened. Fully. Because of this, I lost contact with all my clients, and when I tried to use the “password recovery” function, I received a reply in response that an account with such an e-mail did not exist.

The client left all the files on my computers, so I did not lose any personal data - the situation was not critical. But that's what I lost:

• Lost access to shared folders that I did not own.
• I lost the list of access to folders that I “shared”.
• Lost a few free extra megabytes that I got for bringing my friends to Dropbox, etc.
• All permalinks to read-only public folders that I shared with my classmates have become invalid.
• I had to wait a few hours while ~ 2GB of data was pumped through my barely live ADSL connection to a new Dropbox account.

I tried to contact Dropbox via twitter and via the feedback form, their answer below.

It turns out that this is not a bug, everything is written in the documents.
Here is a FAQ on this:
www.dropbox.com/help/211/en

“If you ever decide to leave the team, then you will not be able to make your team account as an individual, to which you will have access.”

By the way, an e-mail with an invitation to join someone’s “Team” account does not contain information that there will be no way back. Here is the letter I received when I was added:

Hello Yoni
"Name" invites you to join "team name" on Dropbox for teams!
To accept this invitation and improve your account, follow the link:
www.dropbox.com/team/confirm_migrate?signup_key=blablabla .
If you have any questions, please contact “name” by email or support-team@dropbox.com.
Welcome to the team!
- Dropbox

Despite the fact that, in my case, the question will be safely solved soon, the problem itself still remains: You can still delete Dropbox user accounts. In addition, please note: the administrator of the team account has the right to decide whether to restore your account or not. And although in my case there were no problems, no one will help you with a “malicious” removal.

Approximately 2 hours after this message appeared on HN , I received the following email from Dropbox technical support.

Ryan M. - Tech Support Dropbox, Dec 24 09:42 am (PST):
Thanks for your letter.
When you were removed from your former team, your account was also deactivated, as this is part of this process. I am happy to help you and the administrator of your former team in restoring your account.
Given that the team administrator did not have any objections, I will restore your account, but for this you need to first delete the new Dropbox account you created using your email address. Since it is allowed to register only one Dropbox account for the same email address, I will not be able to restore your old account until that email address is available.
After I restore your account, all your files, folders, and any additional storage space that was provided to you will be fully restored.
If I can help you with anything else, let me know.