Backup Slack data | Giorgi Kabanashvili

Update 24.07.2021

Unfortunately, this method does not work anymore. Slack closed access to the API and the script fails after fetching the users list. Please don't use this method anymore. After some quick search, I failed to find a new workaround. So I lost the ability to back up my data. I will keep this post public as a reminder of the lack of choice on modern platforms.

Update 13.08.2023

slackdump command-line tool works well for dumping data. Later maybe I will write a post describing it.

It's annoying for me that you cannot access old messages in Slack's free version.

So I decided to write a small utility to backup messages periodically.

After a quick search, I found a script. It's written in Python and uses the slacker package. You can check the repository by following the link.

To install the slacker package run:

pip install slacker

Next, you need a token. You can get it from Slack's Legacy tokens page. As the title says these tokens are already legacy and will be deprecated in the future. Don't know the exact date but I will update this post accordingly.

Note: Slack Workspace must allow generating tokens to access API. So the administrator of the workspace must allow such access.

So we have the required script, package, and token. To get our backup we can run:

./backup_slack.py --token=<token> --outdir=/home/username/slack-backup

If everything is fine you will get the output:

Saving username list to /home/username/slack-backup/users.json
Saving public channels to /home/username/slack-backup/channels
Saving private channels to /home/username/slack-backup/private_channels
Saving direct messages to /home/username/slack-backup/direct_messages

All data is exported in JSON format.

The size of the exported data is too small in my case. Only a few megabytes. So I decided to run this script with cron on an everyday basis.

Move the script to the bin directory:

sudo cp backup_slack.py /usr/local/bin

Create a backup directory:

mkdir -p ~/Backup/Slack

I decided to create a directory for every run. The format is YYYY-MM-DD. Shell command for that is:

date +%F

But there is a small detail. Cron cannot escape the % sign. So the simplest solution was to write a bash script and move it to the /usr/local/bin.

#!/bin/bash
token="<token>"
dir=~/Backup/Slack/$(date +%F)

backup_slack.py --token=$token --outdir=$dir

Move this script to the bin:

sudo mv slack_backup.sh /usr/local/bin

Next, we need to add a cron task. I chose execution every day at 18:00. Add the following line to /etc/crontab:

0   18  *   *   * username slack_backup.sh

Replace username with yours and restart cron:

sudo systemctl restart cron

Now your Slack data will be exported at 18:00 every day.

For now, I don't need to access or view this data. I just wanted to own my data and don't lose access to it without paying. In the future, I plan to write a merging script and integrate this data into some kind of view application.

I hope it was helpful to you.