Slack retention is a workspace setting, not a promise this tool can verify for you.
Slack's own help pages say a free-plan workspace's admin chooses between two retention settings: track and delete messages/files older than 90 days, or keep no more than 1 year of history without tracking. Which one your workspace uses, and whether anything has already been removed, is not something this tool can determine from an export — only your workspace admin knows. Slack's documented free-plan export layout covers public channels only; this tool reads that layout and reports, per channel, whether it recognizes the directory as a documented channel type or must list it as unconfirmed. This turns that export into one linked, searchable, offline archive — with an honest statement of what was observed versus what cannot be verified.
See a worked examplePreview your own export before you pay; the exact price is confirmed first.
Read your Slack export
Upload your Slack "export public channel data" ZIP — bounded to 25 MiB and 200,000 messages. Get back a self-contained ZIP: an offline, searchable HTML index with client-side search, normalized CSV and JSON, users and threads resolved, a report of anything unresolved, and a completeness statement.
Your result slack-archive.zip
$19.00 one-time
Start with your exportShow the work
Fictional Slack workspace. Actual output.
A ZIP containing users.json, channels.json and two channels' worth of day files — with a thread reply, an edited message, a bot message with a file reference, and one empty channel, to show how each is reported.
Download this inputThe actual output on the input at left: index.html (offline, searchable), messages.csv, messages.json, channels.json, manifest.json and the original file, unmodified.
Download this result| Channel | Messages | First date | Last date |
|---|---|---|---|
| #general | 5 | 2026-08-01 | 2026-08-02 |
| #random | 0 | 2026-08-01 | 2026-08-01 |
Rule version: slackarchive.v1
This archive contains 2 channel(s) and 5 message(s) as received, hashed at e3df9a43740a. This is a free-plan Slack export: it can only ever hold PUBLIC channels, and only whatever message/file history Slack had not already deleted under its 90-day display window and one-year retention limit at export time (see source_citation for the exact Slack help-page wording). No authoritative message-count total was supplied with this export, so completeness beyond what Slack itself would have shown at export time is UNKNOWN -- the hash proves the integrity of the bytes received, not that nothing was already gone before this export was taken.
Confirmed 2026-09-22 from Slack's own help articles: "How to export your workspace data" (https://slack.com/help/articles/220556107) states a free-plan export "includes messages and files shared in public channels only"; the message/file history retention article states the free plan shows "the most recent 90 days of message and file history" and that "all data in your workspace that's more than one year old will be deleted" once a workspace's one-year retention limit takes effect. Slack does not publish this package's exact per-message JSON field set as a versioned export schema; the fields read here are this package's own derived reading of that documented export layout, stated as derived, never as an official Slack spec.
Export compatibility
Slack's own help article "How to export your workspace data" states a free-plan export "includes messages and files shared in public channels only" — private channels and direct messages need Slack's Discovery API on a paid plan. Slack's retention help article ("Manage message and file retention", slack.com/help/articles/203457187) states a free-plan workspace admin chooses one of two settings: track messages/files and delete anything older than 90 days, or keep no more than 1 year of history without tracking age. Both settings mean history can already be gone before you export — which setting your workspace uses is not visible in the export itself, so this tool reports retention as unknown rather than asserting either number as fact.
Slack does not publish its exported per-message JSON fields as a versioned schema. This tool reads the layout widely mirrored by open-source readers such as slack-export-viewer: a top-level users.json and channels.json, and one directory per channel holding one JSON file per calendar day. A day file that does not parse as a JSON array of message objects is refused and listed, never guessed at — the rest of the export is still processed.
No direct messages, no private channels — Slack's free plan does not export them at all. No live Slack connection, no OAuth, no ongoing sync. File attachments are never fetched: Slack's export ships file metadata only, and this tool lists that metadata and states plainly that the file itself was not included.
If your workspace's retention setting has already removed older history, or is about to, export while you still can — this tool cannot restore anything Slack itself has already removed before you ran the export, and cannot tell you which retention setting your workspace uses. Ask your workspace admin if you need to know.
Know before you start
A Slack "export public channel data" ZIP: users.json, channels.json, and per-channel day files. Up to 25 MiB compressed, 20,000 archive members, 200,000 messages. Path traversal, symlinks and unrecognized file types are refused, not silently skipped.
A hash proves the bytes you gave us were preserved intact. It does not prove this is everything your workspace ever held — there is no authoritative total to check it against, and the archive says so explicitly. This is not a complete backup and not a guaranteed recovery of anything Slack itself has already deleted.
This hosted journey sends your file to our server only after you confirm the transfer disclosure. Your uploaded file is retained for up to 30 days, or sooner when you request deletion. Your delivered archive is retained for up to 7 days after it is built. No automated system decides what your data means beyond the documented parsing rules above.
An export with no readable channel day files is refused before any scope is priced. A workspace with zero messages in a channel is still a valid, priced result.