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Retention Purge

slacrawl purge previews or removes messages older than an exclusive cutoff. It is intended for archive-size management and local retention policies. Threads use their parent timestamp, so an expired parent and all of its replies are purged together even when a reply itself is newer than the cutoff. Unsent desktop drafts are independent records and use their own draft timestamp or last update time, including drafts that reply to an expired thread. Legacy draft update times stored at whole-second precision are retained when they fall within the cutoff second rather than risking deletion of a newer draft.

Choose one cutoff:

slacrawl purge --older-than 90d
slacrawl purge --before 2026-01-01
slacrawl purge --before 2026-01-01T12:00:00Z

Dates without a time use midnight UTC. Relative durations accept Go duration syntax such as 2160h plus the Nd day shorthand.

Safety

Preview is the default. A preview reports the affected messages, message-owned rows, and unreferenced cached media without changing the archive:

slacrawl --json purge --workspace T01234567 --older-than 90d

Pass --force to execute:

slacrawl purge --workspace T01234567 --older-than 90d --force

The SQLite transaction deletes:

  • messages
  • message event history
  • file metadata
  • extracted mentions
  • embedding jobs
  • FTS entries

Workspaces, channels, users, and sync state remain. Executed purges also record a per-channel retention floor so ordinary incremental API and MCP syncs do not restore deleted history through their repair overlap. New replies to expired thread parents are also excluded by ordinary incremental ingestion. An explicit full sync, an older --since value, desktop ingestion, or import can restore purged history when the source still exposes it.

Cached media with no remaining database reference is removed by default. Use --keep-media when the binary cache must remain on disk:

slacrawl purge --older-than 90d --force --keep-media

Each forced cleanup scans the cache for unreferenced files, so a later purge retries files left behind by an earlier filesystem error.

Database Size

SQLite reuses pages freed by deletion, but the database file usually keeps its current filesystem size. Use --vacuum to compact it immediately:

slacrawl purge --older-than 90d --force --vacuum

VACUUM requires additional temporary disk space and holds an exclusive database operation while it rebuilds the file.

Git-Backed Archives

Purge changes the local database only. Publish a new snapshot after purging if other readers should receive the retention change. Importing an older snapshot can restore records that were removed locally.