Extract from Jim Gill’s article “Why Not Just Retain Everything In Slack?”
Remember the early days of email when there was such a thing as a clean and organized inbox? I remember I would even create separate folders and organize my messages according to themes. And then at some point, that effort stopped, because the number of messages to manage was just too overwhelming.
Now, we’ve gotten used to never deleting anything, because email has become a searchable personal data repository of sorts, not only for messages but also for the documents attached to those messages.
Now that Slack and other collaboration tools are taking the place of email, will this habit of keeping everything stick?
From an ediscovery standpoint, the idea of broadly preserving data for defensibility, and then narrowly collecting it for review is a good practice. And yes, left to its own devices, Slack will retain all messages and files—including attachments—indefinitely, 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.
But just because you can retain data forever doesn’t mean you should. Most estimates say that 50% or more of enterprise data is ROT: Redundant, Obsolete, or Trivial.
