A tool for backing up your message history from Slack

• Posted 28 December 2016
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I’ve just pushed a small tool to PyPI for backing up message history from Slack. It downloads your message history as a collection of JSON files, including public/private channels and DM threads.

This is mainly scratching my own itch: I don’t like having my data tied up in somebody’s proprietary system. Luckily, Slack provides an API that lets you get this data out into a plaintext form. This allows me to correct what I see as two deficiencies in the data exports provided by Slack:

• They only back up public channels, not private channels or direct messages.
• They’re only available to team admins, not individual users.

Installation is pip install slack_history, then run slack_history --help for usage instructions.

Enjoy!