You finally jumped in a moved all those files off your local hard drive, file share, G Drive or wherever into Box. You carefully planned this move and you have it all neatly arranged in folders and sub-folders with descriptive names so you know at a glance what is where. But then you have the miscellaneous or work folder. In it you have stuff that doesn’t fit in the other folders, it is short term work, or there are copies of files that you have shared because you didn’t want to share it out of the original location. It is a pain to keep up and you don’t really have time to keep going back once a week or once a month or once a year to clean it out and figure what to keep. So, what to do? Enter Box’s expiration settings!
While I focused on a particular folder what follows can be applied to any file or folder anywhere in your folder structure.
Folders: You can set entire folders to auto delete and if it is shared via a shared link you can auto expire the link. To access these settings, click on the box with the three dots to the right of the folder name,
In the drop-down menu click on Settings and then scroll down to Auto Actions.
Here you have two check boxes, one to allow you to set the deletion date of the folder and the other to unshare the folder on a selected date. To unshare a folder it must be shared with a shared link. This will not affect collaborations. Once you select a date to delete and save your changes you will see a scissors icon added to your folder and in the folder details there will be a notification of when that folder will be deleted
You will also get a notification in your messages as the date gets near. If you decide later to either not delete the folder or change the date you can do that at any time before the set date. Besides setting auto unsharing in the folder settings you can also set the date by clicking the gear icon on the shared link dialog and checking the “Disable shared link on …” checkbox. This is the dialog that popped up when you created the shared link. Setting the auto unsharing of a shared link will not add an icon to the folder name but you will see in the folder details the date set to delete the shared link.
Files: Files have similar settings for auto-delete or expiration, and auto unshare for links. To access the auto-delete settings you go to the three dots to the right of the file name in the drop-down menu scroll down to “… More Actions” and then select Set Expiration. Choose a date and save. A scissors icon will appear to the right of the file name and the file details will show the set deletion date.
To access deletion of shared links check box, click on the gear icon above the shared link URL on the shared link dialog box. This is the dialog that pops up when you first setup the shared link.
This will take you to the next page of the dialog where you can set the link expiration date.
As in the previous image you will get a little clock on the shared link dialog that shows the date when you mouse over it along with a notice in the details that your link has a date set.
Now you don’t have to visit or fiddle with those files or folders. They will unshare and/or be deleted on the date set.