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A colleague has announced they are leaving the company in 2 weeks. A few weeks ago, another colleague left the company, and his Slack account immediately disappeared, and I could no longer see any of the old conversations I had with him.

I would like to save all of the conversations I had with this colleague before his Slack account is deleted. Is there any way to do so?

I have already tried going into the Slack client, and scrolling all the way up to the beginning of my conversation history with my colleague. Then I pressed CTRL-A to select everything, and copied and pasted it into a document. What happened is that only the first few months of conversation history were pasted into the document, so that means while you are scrolling through the conversation history, Slack only keeps a few months of history in the buffer.

pacoverflow
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2 Answers2

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The free CLI application Slack Dumper (available for Linux/Mac/Windows) can do this.

To use the application you must first set it up with your Slack credentials (there are detailed instructions on how to do this on the GitHub README). I recommend using Chrome for this as the instructions seem to match this browser most closely (at least more so than Firefox).

You then need the ID(s) of the channel(s) you want to export, which you can obtain by running

slackdump -c

and finding the relevant ID(s) in the first column.

Finally you can export by running

slackdump <ID1> [ID2] ... [IDn]

with the IDs you obtained above.

You can choose whether to export into JSON or a plain-text file by specifying the -r option (values json or text) and can also save shared files with the -f flag. Run slackdump -h to see all options.

See also this question on the Web Applications StackExchange.

Lino Ferreira
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1

You may want try Backupery for Slack app. It will export the necessary conversations (including private channels and DMs) and convert them to HTML so you can review them using any web browser.

Please note, if you are on the Free Slack plan, the message history is limited to the 10.000 most recent messages and the application is unable to go beyond that limit.

Disclaimer: I'm the developer of the app and the app is not free, but a free trial is available. Please let me know if you have any questions!

DenisL
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