Request Access for Notebooks or workspaces from Databricks Community Edition

[dmptiprabhakar]

I have been a long-time user of Databricks Community Edition, where I created and maintained several notebooks for learning and experimentation.

Recently, I understand that the legacy Community Edition has been migrated to the new Free Edition. Since this transition, I am no longer able to access the legacy environment, and I cannot locate or access the notebooks I had previously created.

These notebooks are very important to me, as they contain substantial work and learning accumulated over time. I was not aware that access to the legacy environment or its contents would be discontinued or restricted as part of this migration.

I kindly request your assistance in resolving this issue by helping me with one of the following:

• Restoring access to my notebooks from the legacy Community Edition, or
• Migrating or recovering my existing notebooks to the new Free Edition, if possible.
• Or let me know steps to download my notebooks from the Community Edition.

I would greatly appreciate your support in retrieving this data.

[szymon_dybczak · Accepted solution]

Hi @dmptiprabhakar ,

Unfortunately, the legacy Community Edition has already been retired, and access to Community Edition accounts is no longer available.

[Ashwin_DSA · Accepted solution]

Hi @dmptiprabhakar,

Databricks announced that Community Edition would be retired at the end of 2025, and that after that date, Community Edition accounts would no longer be accessible. Official community guidance now is that legacy CE workspaces are no longer available and cannot be accessed, which includes the notebooks stored there. Before retirement, users had a one-click "Move to Free Edition" migration path and the option to manually export notebooks and re-import them into Free Edition. Once CE was shut down (Jan 1, 2026), any CE workspace that hadn’t been migrated or exported stopped being accessible, and there is no supported way now to recover notebooks from that retired CE environment. That means your old CE notebooks will not appear there unless they were explicitly migrated or exported before retirement.

Free Edition is a separate, modern environment that you access via the Databricks login flow (e.g. login.databricks.com with the Free Edition option). If sign-up with the old CE email keeps failing, try creating a new Free Edition account with a different email (you’ll get a fresh workspace either way). If you still hit the same error, or if you believe you did successfully migrate earlier but don’t see your content, the official escalation path for Free Edition is to email free_edition_help@databricks.com with the email address you used for CE/Free Edition, approximate dates you last used CE and when you tried to migrate/sign in and a screenshot of the error you’re seeing.

Hope this helps!

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