Slack has found a new way to get you to buy a premium plan: it will no longer store message history and files older than a year for the life of your workspace. Starting August 26, 2024, Slack will begin permanently deleting message history and files for free workspace users.
If you’re a free user with your current settings, Slack will display messages and files you’ve uploaded for up to 90 days. You’ll need a Premium subscription to access your older history. Your older history won’t be deleted, but it will remain hidden until you upgrade.
With this latest change, Slack will only store message history and files for up to a year. You’ll still get 90 days of full access for free, and an additional 275 days of access when you upgrade to a paid plan.
“Going forward, data for this workspace will be deleted on an ongoing basis after one year,” Slack said in a support page, warning anyone planning to upgrade to a paid version of Slack after August 26 that “messages and files will not be recoverable once deleted.”
The change also applies to anyone using a trial version of Slack: once the trial ends, the data in your workspace “will be subject to our free workspace message and file deletion policies.” However, the company adds that the new message history limit doesn’t affect Slack Connect channels, which “will continue to function normally, and messages and files contained therein will remain available.”
Slack is also adjusting data retention settings for free workspaces, requiring users to choose whether to delete messages and files (including edits) after 90 days or keep them for a year — it will no longer present the option to keep data for the life of the workspace.
The latest update comes a month after the team messaging platform was accused of using customer data, including messages, content and files, to train its AI models. But in a statement to Neowin, Slack defended itself, saying, “These machine learning models do not access original message content in DMs, private or public channels to make these suggestions.”
