SAN JOSE: Slack users who don't want their chat history and files to be deleted will have to pay for it, the company has announced.

The corporate chat platform says it will begin deleting messages and files older than a year from free workspaces from August 26 onwards - unless the users subscribe to a paid plan.

In June users began receiving emails from Slack that "free workspace content older than one year will be deleted."

Free users will also only have access to the past 90 days of messages and files, Slack says in a new help page for free customers. To access the remaining 275 days of stored data, an upgrade to a paid subscription is needed.

The costs for a subscription depend on the number of users in a workspace and the desired level of support. Users who convert their free workspace to a paid one before the period expires will not have their chats deleted.

Slack is also giving users the option to export any chats and files for use in other programs or for backups. Recovering data is no longer possible after deletion, Slack says.

 - dpa