Around the same time your users stopped gathering in one office, tools like Slack, Teams, and Notion became where project decisions get made, client context gets shared, and onboarding documentation gets built. If you work at a smaller company, a significant chunk of your institutional knowledge could well have migrated into these platforms without anyone noticing.

Several collaboration platform vendors have been investing in features that move them closer to enterprise readiness. Slack offers compliance exports on higher-tier plans, Teams integrates with Microsoft Purview for retention governance, and Notion has added admin controls and workspace analytics. But none of these add up to what IT would consider a true backup.

On Slack’s free plan, messages become hidden after 90 days and are permanently deleted after one year. Paid plans keep messages accessible indefinitely, though if an admin deletes a channel or a departing employee’s account gets deprovisioned, that history can still vanish, taking years of project decisions with it.

Teams stores messages in Exchange Online and governs retention through Microsoft Purview, but configuring retention policies requires at least a Microsoft 365 E3 or Business Premium subscription. Recovering a specific deleted conversation means an admin has to run an eDiscovery search (end users can’t do it themselves). Notion keeps pages as long as your workspace exists, but version history on the free plan covers only a few days, and deleted pages auto-purge from trash after 30 days. You can manually export data, but there’s no scheduled backup and restoring requires contacting Notion support.

Even if the immediate financial hit from losing data on any of these platforms is modest, the staff hours spent reconstructing project context add up fast. If you’re subject to HIPAA, SOX, or similar regulations, the compliance exposure can be worse than the operational disruption.