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Deleted User ends up deleting board

  • 17 September 2020
  • 13 replies
  • 1973 views
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Hi,

 

we’ve had one of our users deleted and it also deleted the boards that they owned. It was an important one and it doesnt appear in trash either.

 

We’ve tried recreating the account in hopes that since its the same email, it would just reactive the deleted account (assuming deleted actually meant deactivated in the database….)

Trying to reach the url doesn’t do anything either. Even the recreated account doesnt get the message about restoring the board.

 

Is thre any way to retrieve the board?

I’ve reached out for support alos by email in hopes that maybe someone can retrieve it in the database or something…

 

It’d be nice if a deleted users board would just get “reassigned” or get asked to reassign to someone through a popup or something….

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Best answer by Robert Johnson 17 September 2020, 20:36

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Robert Johnson
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@Francois Lachance - What type of plan are you on?

Visual Thinker | Volunteer Community Moderator
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Currently using Team plan and I have a meeting tomorrow for the Company one. (the timing I know)

 

Robert Johnson
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@Francois Lachance - Good to know. Since you have a paid plan, you should have the trash can feature. No, I can’t say for sure how this works on the Team Plan, but I just tried a test on the Education Plan (through my spouse’s account). When she goes to delete me from her team and there is a board on her team that I created, she gets the following warning:

 

She chose Delete user and content. When she goes to her dashboard and goes to the Trash can, she can see my board along with a Restore option:

 

She clicked Restore and the board moved out of the trash can and back into the main dashboard/list of boards and was now assigned to herself. Perhaps this will work for you in your Team Plan?

Visual Thinker | Volunteer Community Moderator
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The problem, in our case, it doesn’t appear in the Trash...

Robert Johnson
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Oh crap… read closer Rob! Well, I hope my replies help someone in the future!

But my curiosity will lead me to keep thinking about this…

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Robert Johnson
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Because Audit Logs are only available for the Enterprise Plan, that is not an option.

Trying to reach the url doesn’t do anything either. 

What I thought could have happened is:

  1. The user added themselves to some other Miro team, e.g. they have a Free Plan team and invited themselves to that team.
  2. Then they used the Move to account option to move the board from your company Team Plan to their Free Plan.

I tested this myself and with the board in another plan ad the share settings set to Anyone with the link → No access, when I try to browse to it from a private/incognito browser window, I am just redirected to sign up for Miro, but if I am logged into any Miro account, I see:

 

So then I tried to browse to a bogus board URL and get:

What do you see when you try to browse to the board by URL?

Visual Thinker | Volunteer Community Moderator
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Robert Johnson
Userlevel 7
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@Francois Lachance  - Have you reviewed the How to Restore a Deleted Board help article?

A few things of note in the article:

✏️ If the user was removed from the account and their boards were deleted altogether, Team Admins will see those boards in the Trash bin and will be able to restore them. In that case, the Team Admin becomes the owner of the restored board.

 

And now I see this, which may be the final nail in the coffin:

 

My Miro experiences have been with account profiles being add/removed from Teams, but not the actually deleting of an account profile.

One last question I have re:

We’ve tried recreating the account in hopes that since its the same email, it would just reactive the deleted account (assuming deleted actually meant deactivated in the database….)

When you recreated the account, did you login to Miro as that user and go into the Trash can or try to load the board URL while singed in as the user? I did see that each user will only see boards they created while in their (personal) Trash can. I suspect that the boards are actually linked to a unique user ID in a database and not just by email address. 

Hopefully Miro support will be able to recover this board for you from a backup somewhere!

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Robert Johnson
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One last thing…

we’ve had one of our users deleted and it also deleted the boards that they owned.

When you showed me the message you are seeing of Board has been deleted, I found the following article: https://community.miro.com/got-a-question-ask-the-community-45/someone-deleted-my-board-904

In that article, the board still existed, but the person trying to view it was not the owner.

if you only deleted the user from the team (like my first screenshot above), then I would expect that your Team Plan Admin would see the board in their Trash can.

Visual Thinker | Volunteer Community Moderator
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As a Team Admin, I don’t see it in the trash, I’ve asked the person to check out the Trash and she has nothing either.

 

If she loads the url again, it just says the same thing as me.

 

I figured that even though email addresses might not be unique in the database, that the email would still be unique because thats how you login so you cant have the same email as someone that exists in the database. Assuming that deletion meant deactivating (which is usually the case in most applications) and so recreating the account with the same email would have reactivated the account. But it feels like the accoutn was really deleted and then recreated with a new ID…...anyways, not the point here.

 

So last option is recovering from a backup...

 

Robert Johnson
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Best of luck!

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Robert Johnson
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@Francois Lachance - Was your issue resolved?

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@Robert Johnson I got an answer from the Miro Tech Support. Unfortunately, it is really permanently deleted. So we had to recreate everything from scratch and hoping we don’t forget anything (it was our Roadmap after all...)

 

I was going by the assumption that “deleting” in the user interface might mean “deactivating” in the database, which is a practice I’ve commonly seen in the places I’ve worked at. But it isn’t the case here.

 

It was a mistake on our end so we take full responsibility in the matter and will make sure to protect ourselves better in the future (like doing backups! lol)

 

Thanks for your help!

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