Saving your messages when the app is closing or the account is ending
Request the export today, before anything else, because almost none of them are instant and several of them stop working the moment your account does. Instagram says its export link can take up to 30 days. Discord says up to 30 days and cancels the request outright if you delete your account before the link arrives. Slack exports have to be run by a workspace owner, and when your login is switched off there is nothing left for anyone to hand you. So the order is always the same: request everything first, keep using the account normally while you wait, verify what arrives, and only then close the door.
Save the things only you have, first
If time is short, triage by how replaceable each thing is.
- Private conversations. DMs, group chats, anything one to one. Nobody else can get these for you, and on several platforms nobody can get them for you even with admin rights.
- Files you uploaded. They live on the service, not on your machine. A link to a file you can no longer open is not a copy of anything.
- Things with dates on them that you might need to prove later. Agreements, approvals, the message where somebody said yes.
- Public or shared material. Channels, posts, documents other people also have. Last, because someone else still has a copy.
Most people do this list backwards, spend the week saving the shared drive, and lose the DMs.
How long each export takes, and how long the link lasts
The stated timings, checked on 11 September 2026. They matter because several of them are longer than the notice you get.
- Google. Takeout lets you pick which services to include, delivers by email link or straight to Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Box, and splits large exports into multiple archives. Google says the process can take from a few minutes to a few days, that the archive expires in about 7 days, and that each archive can be downloaded 5 times.
- Instagram and Facebook. In Accounts Center, or Meta Account settings depending on which version you have, under Your information and permissions. Meta says it may take up to 30 days to email the link, and that you then have 4 days to download.
- Discord. Settings, then Data and Privacy, then Request all of my data. Discord says to expect the package within 30 days and that the download link stays active for 30 days. It also says that disabling or deleting your account before the link arrives cancels the request, and that the link goes to whichever email was attached at the time you asked.
- X. Settings and privacy, Your account, Download an archive of your data. You confirm your password, then wait for an email, usually about a day. The download is available for a limited window, so save it the day it lands.
- Telegram. Telegram Desktop only. Settings, Export Telegram data, or the three-dot menu inside a single chat and Export chat history. You choose JSON or HTML. Worth knowing before you plan around it: a newly signed-in session can be blocked from exporting for up to 24 hours as an anti-abuse measure, and confirming the request from a device you are already signed in on clears it.
- Slack. Not yours to run. Exports are started by Workspace Owners and Admins, and on Free and Pro plans they never include DMs or private channels.
Send the export to a device, not to a service you are also losing
Several of these offer to deliver straight into cloud storage. That is convenient and it is exactly the wrong choice if the account you are rescuing is tied to the account you are delivering into.
People do lose everything twice this way: export the work Google account into the work Drive, then lose the work account on Friday. Send it to a personal machine, to an external drive, or to storage that belongs to a different account entirely.
Keep the original zip as it arrived, unopened and unedited, and work on copies. If you ever need to show where a document came from, the untouched archive is the answer.
Open it and check it before you burn anything
An export that arrived is not the same as an export that worked. Three checks, five minutes:
- Find one specific old message you know the content of, and confirm it is in there.
- Look at the earliest date in the file. If the archive does not reach as far back as you expected, it was truncated and you want to know now rather than in March.
- Check that the attachments are present rather than just referenced. Open two or three of them.
If any of those fail, request it again while you still can.
If you are being offboarded
Access usually ends on the last day, and sometimes at the start of it. Assume you have less time than you were told.
Ask for what you need in writing, to a person who can authorise it, and be specific: which channels, which dates, for what. A vague request to IT in your final week gets deprioritised. A named request for a standard export of three channels is a five minute job for whoever runs the workspace.
Be careful about what you take. Personal messages and your own work product are one thing, company documents are another, and the difference matters both to your contract and to your reputation. If you are unsure, ask rather than assuming, and keep a note of what you asked and what you were told.
If the service is shutting down
Shutdown notices come with a date and the export tool is usually switched off at or before it. Do it the day you hear, not the week of.
Export in whatever format is offered even if you have no idea what to do with it. A JSON archive you cannot read today is a JSON archive you can convert next year. An archive you did not download is nothing, forever.
If you are already locked out
Try account recovery properly first, from a device and network you have used before, because the automated checks are not just about the password.
Failing that, there may be a formal route. In the EU and the UK, and in a growing number of other places, you can ask an organisation for a copy of the personal data it holds about you, and in some cases for it in a machine-readable format. The response deadline under the GDPR is one month, extendable by two further months for complex requests if they tell you inside the first month. They will ask you to prove who you are, which is harder when you cannot log in, so expect to send identification.
Where that leaves you depends on where you and the company are, and I am not able to tell you which rules cover your situation. What is worth knowing is that the request goes to whoever controls the data, which for a workplace tool is your employer rather than the software company.
And sometimes the answer is that it is gone. A personal account with no recovery method, on a service with no legal obligation to you, is a real dead end. It is worth hearing that plainly rather than paying someone who claims otherwise.
What you end up holding
Every one of these exports arrives as a zip of files that are complete and close to unreadable. Slack gives you one JSON file per channel per day with account IDs where the names should be. Instagram gives you nested folders with the accented characters double-encoded. X gives you JavaScript files that look like JSON but will not parse because each one starts with an assignment statement.
That is fine for archiving and no use for reading, let alone for showing to anyone else. Converting it is a separate job, and one you can do later, once the files are safely off the service that was about to take them away.
When the rescued export turns out to be a folder of JSON nobody can read, there is a converter here for each of the common ones, including Slack, Discord, Telegram, Instagram and X.
Open Slack to PDF →