Creating Retention Policies for Slack Data

 

Slack data falls into two primary buckets: direct messages and Slack channels. Channels usually are classified as public or private and business-related or social and entertainment-focused. Generally, we recommend that organizations purge direct messages—which are unlikely to provide any value to the business—on a relatively rapid cycle, perhaps every 90 to 180 days. Similarly, organizations can use the same short retention period for data in social and entertainment channels.  On the other hand, data in project-related channels is likely to be a valuable source of institutional knowledge for the organization and may be subject to regulatory retention requirements. For more at Data Retention Policy

 

 

Left to its own devices, Slack will retain all messages and files—including attachments—for as long as your workspace exists. Users of the free version of Slack can only access their most recent 10,000 messages, but all other users can retain everything forever if they wish. Slack also enables basic message retention policies. It provides three options:

 

keep everything, as in the default setting;

keep all messages, but don’t track revisions; or

delete both messages and revisions after a set period. If an organization enables the last retention setting, Slack will automatically delete any messages and files daily as they “age out” beyond the chosen period. Slack advises users that “message and file deletion is permanent” and cautions users to “adjust these settings with care.” Note that Slack also provides an option for individual users to edit the message retention settings for channels and direct messages (DMs). We strongly suggest that Slack administrators disable this function to establish and control its uniform data retention policies. If you do implement a retention schedule for your organization’s Slack data, you’ll also need to plan for legal holds. Slack now enables legal holds through an internal function that permits in-place preservation. 

 

 

How do you then pull data out of Slack for ediscovery review and production? That’s where our purpose-built Slack ediscovery tool, Hanzo Hold for Slack, comes in. Hanzo Hold for Slack makes it easy to incorporate Slack data retention policies into your corporate ediscovery, information governance, and privacy request workflows. With Hanzo Hold for Slack, you can preserve data in place or collect it to preserve, shielding information from loss. You can also search for information by keyword, custodian, channel, date, or all of the above at once, and you can view results together or explore each result individually in its surrounding context. Finally, Hanzo Hold for Slack creates review-platform-ready exports that are clear and simple to read and review. For more at Data Retention Policy