How To Archive a Slack Channel Safely

Once a Slack channel has served its purpose, you may think about deleting it. However, you likely have good reasons to hold onto the information, which is why you need to know how to archive a Slack channel.

Learn how to archive a channel in Slack safely to preserve the information you may need.

Why Do You Need To Know How To Archive Slack Channels?

Slack has taken a top spot among the platforms that businesses use to keep in touch, with a healthy 18% market share. Therefore, a lot of important information crosses its channels daily.

That information may be necessary long after team members stop using a particular channel. Common reasons to archive a Slack channel include:

• Industry regulations may mandate that you retain communications for a set period for audits and reviews.
• You could also want to preserve the information for data analytics, continuity, or institutional knowledge that aids decision-making.
• Archiving can facilitate eDiscovery, allowing your legal team to rapidly retrieve, review, and produce relevant communications.
• The communications can also aid in later internal investigations or employee monitoring.

As you can see, data archiving is a critical part of doing business. Consequently, you need a dependable process for how you archive Slack channels.

How Do You Archive a Channel in Slack?

Workspace Owners and Org Owners of a Slack account determine who may archive a channel. Whoever the account owners designate as channel managers always have the ability to archive channels.

The default setting allows all users who aren’t guests to be able to archive channels that they are members of. Therefore, account owners need to specifically restrict these permissions as necessary.

On a mobile device, you can archive a channel by opening the channel and tapping the channel name in the conversation header. Then, select “Archive channel” and confirm by clicking “Archive.”

On a desktop machine, you open the channel and click the channel name. Then, go to Settings, click “Archive channel for everyone,” and “Archive channel.”

In either type of device, channel managers can also archive channels from the central dashboard. However, this feature is only available on the Enterprise Grid or Business+ plans.

How Do You Make Archived Slack Data More Manageable for eDiscovery?

It’s straightforward to archive a channel in Slack, but performing high-level searches among its messages and attachments takes a lot of time if you do so manually. Time is precious during eDiscovery, so it makes sense to use another cloud-based platform to secure and manage the data.

Cloudficient Expireon simplifies collecting data, handling forensic collection, and executing granular searches from archived data. The typical challenges of indexing and format inefficiencies during export become a thing of the past with our service.

Can You Reactivate an Archived Slack Channel?

Slack allows you to unarchive a channel, too, but only from a desktop device. Go to the “Channels” tab and search for the channel’s name or description. (You could also click the “Channel type” filter and choose “Archived channels.”)

Pick the channel, click its name in the conversation header, and click “Settings.” From there, click “Unarchive the channel” to reactivate the archived channel.

Public channels do not restore the members, so you will have to add users back to the channel manually. When you archive a Slack channel that is private, the platform retains the members, so it restores them when you unarchive the channel.

Can You Archive the General Channel in Slack?

No, you cannot archive, set to private, or delete the general channel in Slack. This channel functions as a default channel for each member in your workspace and provides a place where the entire team can get messages.

Though you can’t archive the general channel, Slack allows the administrator to manage certain settings. For example, you can set the channel topic and description. You can also restrict who can post on the channel and adjust some notification settings.

What’s the Difference Between Archiving and Backing Up a Slack Channel?

Sometimes, people use “backup” and “archive” interchangeably, but they aren’t the same thing. You want to be sure to use the right term when discussing data security and retention policies so that no one handles messages incorrectly.

Archiving a Slack channel means closing a channel to any activity while still retaining the message history within the platform. That includes being able to search all of the files that users shared.

A system for backups continually makes second copies of the data in your system, including active channels. This protects you in case of an accidental or malicious deletion of files or a channel. With a backup, you can restore your system to the way it was at a recent point in time.

Bear in mind that a lone backup solution is not going to cover everything you need for compliance, investigation, or legal purposes. A comprehensive data management solution includes the ability to easily back up active channels and archive unused ones.

How Do You Delete a Slack Channel Altogether?

The time may come when a channel is just taking up memory. Once a Slack channel has come to the end of its lifespan and you have no compliance or regulatory reasons to keep it, you can delete it.

As with unarchiving a channel, you can only delete a channel from a desktop device. For an active channel:

• Open the channel in question
• Click its name in the conversation header.
• Choose “Settings.”
• Click “Delete channel.”
• Click “Delete this channel.”

You must verify your decision by clicking a checkbox for “Yes, permanently delete the channel.” When you click “Delete Channel,” Slack erases the channel for good.

To delete an archived Slack channel, find the channel the same way you would find it to unarchive it. However, select “Delete this channel” and follow the same steps as above.

Deleting a channel is a permanent step if you are working strictly with the Slack platform. However, you can use external cloud backup solutions to back up your Slack information and restore channels if you have the appropriate settings. Make sure your data retention policies account for such scenarios and prevent accidental or malicious deletion of Slack data.

Make It Easy to Archive Slack Channels With Expireon

You already have a lot to do in your business, so you shouldn’t have to devote a lot of time and energy to making sure you’ve adequately secured your Slack data. We can take any of those challenges off of your plate.

Expireon offers you an excellent solution for the retention and discovery of your Slack data. You won’t have to worry about how to archive a Slack channel properly because the software handles it and ensures full security and compliance.

Cloudficient’s unrivaled, next generation, cloud archive technology, Expireon, is revolutionizing the way businesses manage data during and after enterprise transformation projects. Guiding customers through every step of the process, our expert team provides the support and solutions you need to succeed. 

Whether you are expiring legacy archives, migrating data to the cloud, or requiring ongoing data capture and retention, Expireon allows you to discover more, process less! 

Bring Cloudficiency to your Information Governance: visit our website or contact us directly.