Data recovery guides
How to extract your message history
Practical guides to getting your message history out of the platforms that hold it, written by the engineers building permanent message archives.
10
Guides published
9
Networks covered
25 GB
Export ceiling per archive
Forever
History we index
All articles
Trengo alternatives in 2026: what the six real options cost
Trengo charges EUR 299 a month for 10 users and 6,000 conversations a year. Here is the arithmetic on Trengo, Front, Intercom, Zendesk, Respond.io and CommunicationOS for a 15-person team over 12 months.
9 min read • Adam Albastov
What a shared inbox costs when conversations are metered
Conversation metering ties your invoice to customer behaviour. How the 24-hour and 7-day windows work, three worked cost scenarios, and a ten-step audit of any vendor pricing page.
9 min read • Adam Albastov
Why you cannot search your group chats
Messaging apps index text on the device, skip voice notes and images, and let the other party edit the record. A technical explanation of why per-app search cannot answer what did we agree, and what a real index has to do.
8 min read • Adam Albastov
Messaging compliance for regulated trade
Retention schedules, legal hold, eDiscovery and GDPR when the deal happens on WhatsApp. How firms in diamond trading and telecom keep messaging records without breaking storage limitation rules.
9 min read • Adam Albastov
How to export your Instagram and Messenger conversations
The Meta Accounts Center download, step by step, plus the parts nobody warns you about: no per-thread scope, re-encoded media, mojibake in the JSON, and no export at all from Business Suite.
9 min read • Adam Albastov
How to Export Slack Messages on a Free Plan Before the 90 Day Window Closes
Run the Slack standard export, read the JSON, and understand what a free plan will never give you. The 90 day visibility rule, missing direct messages, file links that expire, and the API route around it.
10 min read • Adam Albastov
How to Move WhatsApp Chats to a New Phone (and What Breaks Along the Way)
Transfer WhatsApp history between Android phones, between iPhones, and across the Android and iOS divide. The steps that work, the things that never move, and why a salesperson's handset is a business risk.
11 min read • Ben Auerbach
How to Export Telegram Chat History: Desktop, JSON and the API
Export Telegram chats from the desktop client, choose between HTML and JSON, get around the 24 hour security wait, and pull very large supergroups through the MTProto API without tripping flood limits.
8 min read • Adam Albastov
How to Export Discord Server History: Data Requests, Exporters and Bots
Get a whole Discord channel out, not just your own messages. Discord's data request, DiscordChatExporter, a custom bot with the right intents, thread coverage, and what a compliance team will ask for.
9 min read • Adam Albastov
Take ownership of your business conversations
Connect nineteen messaging networks to one archive. Search ten years of company discussions without paying per conversation or per teammate.