What's Changing?
Beginning March 15, 2022, in order to improve security and reduce our overall data consumption Berkeley IT will be implementing a new account lifecycle process to decommission Box accounts associated with expired CalNet accounts. Make sure you save your own copy of shared content if it’s owned by an expired account.
An expired account is any UC Berkeley account that has exited the grace period after the account owner has left the university. Grace period durations vary based on the affiliation with the university. During the grace period, the Box account and data remain fully accessible. Once an account expires, the account and content stored in Box will begin the decommissioning cycle.
The Decommissioning Cycle
Once an account expires, the account and content stored in Box will begin the decommissioning cycle.
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On the date of expiration, the account will become inaccessible to the account holder, but the data owned by the account shared with other accounts will continue to be available for six months.
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Six months after expiration, the data will no longer be available to collaborators.
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One year after expiration, the account and all data owned by the account will be irrevocably deleted.
Collaborator Reports
On April 21-22, 2022, we provided collaborator reports for accounts that are accessing data shared from expired accounts. These reports were shared with customers via the Box Administrator account. The shared files use the naming convention "[CalNetID]'s access to shared items in Box with expired owners 2022-04-20.docx". These share notification emails are legitimate, but if you are concerned about clicking a link in your email, you can find the shared file in the root of your Berkeley Box account in the web console. If you need access to items listed on your collaborator's report, the best course of action is to make a copy of the contents, preferably to a Special Purpose Account (SPA) if the contents are departmental in nature.
If you are planning to graduate or leave the university soon, make sure you transfer ownership of any shared content to another account that will be remaining active.
Departmental Content
Finally, departmental shared content should be owned by Special Purpose Accounts (SPAs). SPAs are CalNet IDs that can be shared by multiple users for collaborative purposes. SPAs can have their own Box accounts so that data ownership is not tied to any one member’s active or expired status. Additionally, SPAs are allowed a higher storage capacity in Box. To learn more about using a SPA with Box, visit this article
Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns.