Accidentally removed the only workspace admin – Free Edition

[RodrigoSilva]

Hello Databricks Team,

I accidentally removed my own user account from the admins group in my Databricks Free Edition workspace.

I was the only administrator, and I can no longer access the Identity and Access settings.

My account still has access to the workspace, but it only belongs to the users and users-clone groups.

Is there any supported way to restore my administrator privileges without deleting the workspace?

Thank you!

[Ashwin_DSA]

Hi ,

Sorry to hear about this. On a paid Databricks account, the normal recovery path is to log in to the account console as an account admin and reassign the workspace admin role from there. However, Free Edition accounts do not have access to the account console or account-level APIs and lack SSO and SCIM support.  That means the usual self-service recovery paths are not available to you.

The workspace-level Groups API (SCIM) exists, but modifying the admins group requires workspace admin privileges, which you no longer have. So the API route is also a dead end in this case.

Since there is no self-service way to restore admin privileges on a Free Edition workspace without account console access, your best option is raise it here and explain the situation. They may be able to re-add your user to the admins group on the backend.

If that does not work, creating a new Free Edition workspace is unfortunately the fallback. Your data and notebooks in the current workspace would not carry over automatically, but you could export notebooks beforehand (you still have workspace access) and re-import them into the new workspace.

If this answer resolves your question, could you mark it as “Accept as Solution”? That helps other users quickly find the correct fix.

[RodrigoSilva]

Thanks for your help, I'll open a new topic as recomended.