Disabling Users

Disabling a user immediately blocks login access while keeping the account, configuration, and historical context intact. This approach fits temporary access removal, incomplete onboarding, role transitions, or security reviews where permanent removal is not required.

Files.com supports manual, scheduled, automated, and programmatic methods for disabling users. These options allow Site Administrators and Workspace Administrators to apply access controls consistently while reducing the risk posed by unused or inactive accounts.

Users can be disabled by directly editing the user's settings, or through automatic features: User Lifecycle Rules, disabling inactive users, disabling users who have never logged in, or expiring a user's access on a specific date.

Automatically Disable Inactive Users

Disabling logins for inactive users reduces the risk of unauthorized access to the system. Dormant accounts are often targeted by attackers. Disabling these accounts shrinks the attack surface and improves overall system security.

The recommended approach is to create a User Lifecycle Rule, which gives you finer control over how inactive user accounts are handled at the site level. You can define rules based on authentication method, number of inactive days, and whether the rule includes Folder Admins or Site Administrators. For example, you may choose to disable password-based users after 30 days of inactivity, while allowing SSO users a longer duration. These rules override the older site-level setting and individual user-level options.

In some cases, you may want to prevent a particular user from being disabled or deleted due to inactivity. To do this, you can bypass User Lifecycle Rules for that user.

Manually Disable a User

You can manually disable a user's account by editing the user's settings. This option takes effect immediately.

Site Administrator user accounts cannot be disabled. To disable a site-administrator's account, you must first revoke their administrator privileges.

Set an Access Expiration Date in the User's Settings

Assigning an expiration date grants access only for the period the user needs it, which matters when the user is associated with a limited-duration project or a contracting period.

Edit the user's Access expiration date to specify the date after which the user cannot log in. A Site Administrator, Workspace Administrator, or Partner Admin can set this option when the user is created, so access ends automatically on a defined date.

Users whose access is due to be disabled by an expiration are immediately prevented from logging in. The Files.com platform runs a separate automated process to update the status of user accounts. That process runs every few hours, leaving a small time gap between the user's expiration date taking effect and the user's account indicating the status is Disabled. During this short period, the web interface shows that the user's status is Pending Disable, and they are blocked from logging in.

Automatically Disable Newly Created Inactive Users

Automatically disabling newly created users who have never logged in within a reasonable timeframe is a good security practice and a safeguard that your onboarding procedures get completed.

When setting up a new user account, you can specify a mandatory time window within which the user must perform their initial login. Enter the number of days in the Number of days user must first login by field while creating a new user. You can also set or modify this value by editing the user's Automatically disable this user if not logged in by this date setting. This setting only applies to new users who have never logged in to the system at least once.

Once it is set, failure to log in within this period will result in automatic deactivation of the user account.

The Files.com platform runs a separate automated process to update the status of user accounts. The automated process runs every few hours, leaving a small time gap between the user's required first login date and the user's account indicating the status is Disabled. During this short period, the web interface shows that the user's status is Pending Disable, and they are blocked from logging in.

Programmatically Disable Users

Our Command Line Integration (CLI) App and SDKs can also be used to programmatically disable user accounts.

Deleting Disabled Users

Site Administrators or Workspace Administrators can configure the Delete disabled users after a time period setting to automatically remove user accounts that have been disabled for a certain number of days.

Effects of Disabled Users

Once a user is disabled/deactivated, they are not able to log in. A Site Administrator must explicitly re-enable the account before the user may access the site.

Administrators can create email notifications and share link notifications for disabled users, but disabled users will not receive notification emails.

Disabled users are not counted for billing purposes.

Disabling users does not reduce your site's storage usage. If a file or folder is stored in Files.com, it counts toward storage usage. User count and user status have no relation to storage usage.

Share Links created by a user who has been deactivated remain available by default, and site administrators can still manage those links. Enabling the Auto-revoke Share Links for deactivated users setting automatically revokes all Share Links when a user is disabled or deleted, so no manual cleanup is needed.

Disabling a user blocks all access but does not affect logging. User activity and settings logs remain intact after a user is disabled. Historical activity and configuration changes remain available and can still be reviewed in the logs.

Re-Enable a User

User accounts marked as disabled must be re-enabled by a site administrator. Files.com does not provide any automated re-enablement of users, since re-enabling a user needs to be examined carefully by a site administrator.

A user account can be manually re-enabled by changing the Account enabled toggle back to the active state, which takes effect immediately.

Our Command Line Integration (CLI) App and SDKs can also be used to programmatically enable user accounts.