How to delete your Affine account

About deleting your Affine account

Affine is an open-source, privacy-focused alternative to Notion that combines documents, whiteboards, and databases into a single, unified workspace. It is designed for knowledge management, project tracking, and collaborative brainstorming, allowing users to build complex internal wikis or personal knowledge bases. Because Affine stores substantial amounts of intellectual property, project workflows, and collaborative notes, users may eventually choose to delete their accounts to consolidate their data, migrate to self-hosted versions, or minimize their digital footprint.

Users often seek to delete their Affine account for several specific reasons:

• Transitioning away from cloud-hosted workspaces to a self-hosted Affine instance for maximum data sovereignty.
• Consolidating scattered documentation into a different platform that offers native third-party integrations not currently supported by Affine.
• Concerns regarding the long-term synchronization of sensitive project metadata stored on public cloud servers.
• Reclaiming disk space and clearing out obsolete collaborative blocks or orphaned database entries.

What happens to your data

When you initiate the deletion process for your Affine account, the system triggers a cleanup of your cloud-hosted workspace data. Affine generally handles data removal by purging your user profile from their primary production databases. However, it is important to understand the specific data categories involved:

• Workspace metadata and structural configurations.
• Collaborative blocks, including text, whiteboards, and database relations.
• Personal account profile information, such as email addresses, user identity tokens, and access logs.
• Uploaded assets, such as images or documents embedded within your pages.

Note that while active workspace data is usually wiped, some service logs may persist in backups for a limited period for security auditing or platform maintenance as per their internal compliance policies. If you are using a self-hosted instance of Affine, deleting your account via the UI may not delete the underlying Docker containers or database volumes; you must manually purge those assets from your own infrastructure.

Privacy considerations

Using Affine, especially in the cloud-hosted version, involves entrusting your data to their infrastructure. Unlike traditional SaaS tools, Affine prioritizes open-source transparency, but users should still consider the following:

• Affine stores your workspace data in a way that allows for synchronization across devices, which means data is processed on their servers.
• Be cautious of the third-party dependencies used in the cloud version, as these may have their own telemetry or analytics protocols.
• If you collaborate with others, deleting your account may leave "ghost" entries in shared workspaces unless you delete the specific workspace blocks before closing your account.
• Always export your data using the built-in export features (to Markdown or PDF) before deleting your account to ensure no information is lost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will deleting my account also delete my self-hosted Affine data?

No, deleting a cloud account through the Affine dashboard does not affect locally hosted instances running on your own servers or Docker containers.

Can I recover my Affine pages after I delete my account?

Generally, account deletion is permanent. Once the account is purged from the production database, the recovery of workspace blocks is not possible.

Does Affine store a backup of my data after I request deletion?

While production data is removed, some residual logs or backups may exist temporarily; however, these are typically protected by automated rotation policies.

What happens to the shared workspaces I created?

If you are the owner of a workspace, deleting your account will usually render that workspace inaccessible or orphaned for other members unless ownership was transferred.

How long does it take for the deletion to process?

Deletion of cloud-based Affine accounts is typically processed near-instantly, effectively removing your credentials and workspace access upon confirmation.

Can I delete only my user profile without deleting my workspaces?

Usually, your account is tied to your workspace ownership. If you wish to keep workspaces but lose your personal profile, you should consider transferring ownership to another user account first.