Is it possible to recover ownership of an old account?

[Deleted user]

I only have access to my current account. Since I have no access to the old one, I cannot proceed with any of the standard procedures.

I wonder if there is a way to validate my identity and recover the ownership of the repositories in the old account.

Thank you in advance

[Theodora Boudale · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

The following community article explains in detail how we verify account ownership, what the support team can help with, what we cannot help with, and recovery options:

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-articles/Bitbucket-Cloud-account-ownership-and-data-access/ba-p/1311340

You can read the article and if you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

If the account is a non-managed account, or if it is a managed account with no SSO configured, and you remember the account's password, you should be able to log in to the account even if you don't have access to its email.

If you don't remember the account's password and no SSO is configured, you would need to regain access to its primary email to request a password reset email and access the account.

If SAML SSO is configured for the email's domain, then authentication is only possible with the organization's identity provider.

Kind regards,
Theodora

[Deleted user]

Hi Theodora,

The old email account was deleted and I suppose that the BitBucket account was also deleted (if it's possible keeping the public repositories online after that) or maybe only associated with that deleted email account. I don't know how to check this and whether Atlassian could verify my identity.

There a are three repositories on that old account, all of them related to and End Of Degree Project. So I would like to gain access to find a solution as redirecting to my new account or merge them instead.

Thank you

[Theodora Boudale]

Hi David,

We verify ownership based on the email address one uses to reach out to us. When someone creates a support ticket, they do this using an email address of theirs. In community, we check the email address of the user that creates a question. For non-managed accounts: if the email used to create a support ticket or community question is different than the email of a Bitbucket Cloud account, we don't consider that email as owner of the account.

I can see that you have created a support ticket as well regarding this issue and mentioned there which the old Bitbucket account/workspace is. This old account still exists (otherwise the public repos associated with it wouldn't be visible) and it is associated with only one email address, which is different than the email address of your community account.

We don't have a way to verify that you used to own this old account's email address since you are reaching out to us using another email, so we cannot make any changes to this account's email.

If you don't remember the account's password, the only way to regain access would be to recreate the email account associated with it and request a password reset email.

Kind regards,
Theodora

[Deleted user]

Thank you for your interest and help.

I tried to recover the email address but it's been a long time and it's not possible to reactivate the account nor to register a new one with the same name for security reasons.

I don't have the interest of accessing any account associated data... only to recover the ownership of all copies of the academic work from the public repositories. As an academic work that is registered in institutional repositories by my university, I suppose although it would be a tedious option, I could achieve that through copyright or GDPR requests that would lead either to personal identification to recover it or at least to get the not managed resources removed.

Given that, If there are no other easier options on your own I think we could close this thread.

Kind regards,

David

[Theodora Boudale]

Hi David,

Since the repositories are public, you could take a clone of the repos and recreate them in the workspace of your new Bitbucket Cloud account.

I understand what you're saying about not needing access to the account's data, but I'm afraid we cannot transfer repository ownership either. The only way to do that would be with a valid court order directing Atlassian to grant you the access you seek.

Kind regards,
Theodora