How to Download Slack Message History Without Being an Admin

Like many people who work on a team, I spend a lot of time on Slack. But I’m not a fan of this software either. I just chat on the channels assigned to me by my customers and partners. As such, I never paid much attention to archiving and preserving conversations. It’s just part of my work day.

Slack is a collaborative work tool for businesses of all sizes. It provides a collaborative platform that allows your teams to communicate better in their projects.

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  • Release date : 06/06/2022
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But recently, a team member working for a client of mine left his company. And when I returned to our private Slack direct message thread, I found it was gone. Since his account had been deleted, the chat had also disappeared.

The problem is that this thread contained a lot of important information, information that I needed to continue to provide my services to my client. It contained my marching orders for the next few months, discussions of helpful resources and stats I need, but also discussions of the subject matter experts on the project, their areas of expertise, and their roles. In other words, this thread was valuable. We had even dealt with my fees.

Without thinking too much about it, I figured that Slack’s message history would work the same way as an email archive. I always assumed that I could go back and look at things for reference whenever needed. But yet, as disturbing as that seemed to me, that is not the case.

Find the archive of a message

There is a way to access the message archive. If you click on the little clock icon at the top of your screen, you can see a history of recent conversations.

Unfortunately, these conversations don’t stay on this list forever. Only the latest conversations remain available. Even if you press Show more, message history is limited. Also, old conversations with accounts that haven’t been on Slack for about a month are no longer available. I definitely confirmed this because a long thread of conversation with another client team member who left the project about six weeks ago has completely disappeared.

But, if you act quickly after deleting an account, you can find the archive in order to save it.

Backup a Slack message archive

Slack lets you export and save a message archive, but only if you’re the channel owner or admin. That said, there are ways – even if you’re not a channel superuser – to retrieve the entire history of a given thread. These approaches aren’t particularly elegant, but they work.

Copy/Paste in Word

The first approach is to capture all of your thread’s text into a Word document, which you can then save, convert to PDF at sodapdf esign, or archive. Theoretically, you could use another word processor, but I tested this trick with Word. It’s best to use software that saves rich text, so images, emojis, and links are also preserved.

    1. select the Slack thread you want to back up;

 

    1. scroll to the very beginning, and click with the left mouse button on the very first word of the text;

 

    1. scroll to the bottom of the thread by holding the key Shift then click after the last word;

 

    1. go in Edit > Copyor press the keys CTRL and VS ;

 

    1. open a blank Word document and click to stick on (Where CTRL + V);

 

  1. save your document.

You now have an editable, searchable and clickable archive. The only downside to this approach is that the final saved archive won’t look exactly like it does in Slack. To remedy this, try the following approach.

Take scrolling screenshots

This approach takes a screenshot of the entire thread, even if you have to scroll through the pages one after the other. To do this, you must use software capable of capturing a scrolling page.

There are a bunch of Chrome extensions that do this, but to capture the Slack app, I recommend using CleanShot X, on Mac, or SnagIt, on Windows.

A powerful screen capture tool for your Windows computer. Allows you to capture the entire screen, an area to be defined, etc. it even offers a video screen recorder.

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  • Author : TechSmith Corporation
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Both of these software allow you to select a window to capture, scroll through all the windows, and then save the image in PNG, JPEG or PDF format.

This approach gives you a conversation that looks exactly like it did when you were in Slack. Without OCR tools, you can’t search or access the underlying data, but it’s a good snapshot of evidence if you ever need to prove what was discussed with another party.

The main thing to remember

What you need to remember from this article is that Slack is not email and it does not automatically create an archive of your conversations. If your conversations are important, you will need to be proactive in order to back them up.

If important information sometimes or often slips into your Slack chats, it might be worth adding these manual archiving methods to your workflows on a regular basis.