Leaving or deleting a space

Leaving versus deleting

Leaving removes you from a space. Deleting removes the space from everyone. They are not variations on the same thing, and only the owner can do the second one.

Leaving a space

Available to any member who is not the owner, on any space that is not your personal space. It is in the space menu.

What happens:

• You lose access to its documents.
• Your chats that were linked to it are unlinked, not deleted. The conversations stay exactly as they were.
• Your workflows pointing at its documents lose that source. They keep running without it, so a workflow you rely on is worth opening afterwards to see whether it still does what you need. See Connecting a space to a workflow.
• Nothing you uploaded leaves with you. Documents belong to the space.

You can rejoin later if it is public, or if someone invites you again.

Deleting a space

Owner only, and never your personal space.

This one is permanent. Deleting a space also deletes:

• Every reference document in it, and every file inside those documents.
• The search indexes built from them.

There is no undo and no recycle bin. If the space held the only copy of something, that copy is gone.

What survives a deletion

• Chats that were linked to it. They are unlinked, not deleted, for every member.
• Workflows. Any step pointing at the deleted documents simply loses that source.
• Documents already generated. A note that quoted a guideline is a finished document and does not refer back to it.

Before deleting a shared space

Members lose everything in it at the moment you press delete, and there is no way to hand a space over to someone else first. If a department depends on it, the safest move is usually to make it private and stop maintaining it rather than to delete it outright.

At the very least, tell people first, and give anyone who needs the source files a chance to keep their own copy.