How to remove users without losing chat data
When an employee leaves your company, the last thing you want is for their contributions to the corporate knowledge base to walk out the door with them. A major difference between using a self-hosted messenger and a cloud-based service lies in how much control you have over this process.
This article compares how you can remove users without losing critical chat data in both environments.
User data removal on self-hosted vs cloud messengers
In the digital workplace, a user's chat history is more than just a conversation. It is a record of project decisions, technical solutions, and institutional knowledge. When an employee leaves, companies face a critical challenge: How do you revoke their access immediately without creating "black holes" in your team's chat history?
The answer depends heavily on whether you own your server (self-hosted) or rent it from a third party (cloud).
The best solution is to deactivate a user rather than delete. Let's see what the difference between deactivation and deletion of a user account is:
- Deactivation: Revokes login credentials immediately but keeps the user's profile and data stored in the system. Their past messages remain visible in group chat rooms, and chat history in private chat rooms remains intact.
- Deletion: Permanently scrubs the user's identity from the database. This can cause their messages to disappear entirely or be reassigned to a generic "Ghost User", making old conversations confusing and difficult to audit.
Let's see how this works in cloud and self-hosted environments.
Cloud messengers
In cloud environments like Slack, Google Chat or MS Teams, user data is tied to licensing and retention policies. You don't own the database, so you must rely on the vendor's tools to preserve history.
When you remove a user's license, the account is deactivated, and the user can no longer log in. All past messages typically remain visible in group chats and channels. The profile name might change to something like "Deactivated User". However, in some cloud services, private messages between the removed user and others may eventually be archived or become harder to search, depending on the service tier you pay for.
One of the biggest dangers in cloud environments is file loss. For example, in MS Teams, if a user shared files from their personal OneDrive in a chat, and their account is fully deleted after a grace period (usually 30 days), those files may become inaccessible to the rest of the team. In such cases, admins must manually move critical files from a departing user's OneDrive to a shared SharePoint site before the deletion window closes.
Self-hosted messengers
In a self-hosted environment, you own the database. This gives you absolute control over what gets kept and what gets deleted, making it much easier to preserve corporate memory without relying on expensive enterprise add-ons.
For example, in Virola Messenger, the admin can suspend any user account by clicking on it and selecting the "Suspend user account" option from the context menu. The user is instantly logged out and cannot sign back in. Because you control the database on your own server, nothing is deleted. All messages, file attachments, and channel memberships remain exactly as they were. The user's profile is still visible with a respective status, so old conversations remain easy to read and understand. All attachments are stored on your own server's file system. Suspending a user does not touch these files. They remain accessible to everyone who had access to them before.
Moreover, you do not need to pay for a suspended user. In Virola Messenger, the license is based on the number of online users. This way, your suspended users just remain on your database, and their conversations and files can be easily accessed and searched.
For companies that prioritize data integrity and want a simple offboarding process, self-hosted messengers offer a clear advantage. By owning the infrastructure, you eliminate the risk of accidental file loss and avoid the complex licensing rules that govern data retention in the cloud.
Stop renting your history. Own it with a self-hosted solution like Virola Messenger.