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Comment by davidmurdoch | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how this will work with slack orgs with short data retention policies. It wouldn't make sense to delete parts of a Canvas, as "Canvas docs are collaborative, and all their comments are just Slack threads." (from https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23361717/slack-canvas-doc...)

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Bear in mind that at this time, and for many years, data retention policies simply do not apply to uploaded files in a given channel (IIRC it does apply to global retention, but I'm not totally sure of the current behavior). There's a sensitive channel with a short retention period in a Slack for a company I do some consulting for and every few months I remind the admins that images/PDFs/etc that are uploaded to the channel are not purged and they should manually do it... but there's still stuff in there from 2016 if I do a search in:#channel for Files.

It sounds like there’s no file retention policy specified for that Slack workspace. It’s possible to set a policy specifically for files.

https://slack.com/help/articles/203457187-Customize-message-...

Right, the issue is that it's not possible to set file retention for individual channels/conversations, so if you want to have long-term file retention in some places and brief in others, it can't be done (additionally (in my experience, at least), people tend to believe that setting message retention will also apply to files -- it's not called out in the interface/etc).

That’s an interesting question. My bet is it would work similarly to Confluence, Google Docs etc. Basically the canvas would be deleted based on the creation date.

As for the associated Slack message thread, those should be just like they are today. Each individual message in the thread is deleted based on when it was originally created.

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