monday.com Data Export: Your Archive Does Not Come
The account export is admin-only, takes up to 24 hours to build, and the link dies 24 hours later. It also leaves your archived boards behind entirely.
Exit score: 21 / 30
How hard monday.com makes it to leave with your data intact, scored against 6 criteria from the vendor's own published documentation. How we score.
| Criterion | Score | What the documentation says |
|---|---|---|
| Self-service | 3/5 | Available from inside the product, but only to account admins: "As the account admin, you can download your entire account's data to your device." An ordinary member cannot take the full export. |
| Format openness | 3/5 | Delivered as a zip of board data plus uploaded files. Board-level export to Excel is separately documented. The format inside the account zip is not specified on the page. |
| Completeness | 3/5 | All boards, shareable and private, plus uploaded files. Excluded: Dashboards, archived boards, Workdocs, and the Emails & Activities timeline - four named omissions, one of which is your entire archive. |
| Not paywalled | 5/5 | No plan restriction is stated on the account export article, which suggests the route out is open on every tier including the two-seat free plan. |
| Documentation clarity | 5/5 | Names its exclusions explicitly, states processing time and link expiry, and discloses the once-per-24-hours throttle and that all admins are notified. Nothing important is left implicit. |
| Caps and expiry | 2/5 | Three limits compound: the export "takes up to 24 hours", the download link is "valid for 24 hours", and you may only export "once every 24 hours". A missed download costs you a full day. |
What comes out
- All boards, both shareable and private, in a zip file.
- Files uploaded to boards - with an option to exclude them to speed the export up.
- The underlying board data behind dashboards, even though the dashboards themselves do not travel.
- Board-level exports to Excel, documented separately from the account export.
What stays behind
- Archived boards - excluded from the account export entirely.
- Dashboards, though the boards feeding them are included.
- Workdocs.
- The Emails & Activities timeline, which is where client correspondence logged in monday lives.
monday.com does something most products on this site do not: it tells you exactly what its export leaves behind. Four named exclusions, stated plainly, in the same article that explains how to run it.
That candour earns it full marks on documentation and it is why this report can be specific. It also means the bad news is right there to read, and one item on the list is worse than the other three combined.
Archived boards do not come with you
The account export excludes archived boards.
Think about what that means in a working account. Archiving is the tidy-up action — the thing you do when a project ships, a client engagement ends, a quarter closes. It is not deletion. It is the product's own mechanism for saying "finished, keep it."
So the boards most likely to be archived are precisely the completed work: the client project from two years ago, the launch you might need to evidence, the campaign whose numbers someone will ask about. An agency that has run monday.com for three years may have more value in its archive than on its active boards.
None of it is in the export, and the file gives no indication that anything is missing.
The fix costs one afternoon: unarchive everything you want to keep before you run the export. It is inelegant and it works. Do it before, not after — once the subscription ends there is nothing to unarchive from.
The 24-hour squeeze
Three limits sit on top of each other, and each is reasonable alone:
- The export takes up to 24 hours to process.
- The download link is valid for 24 hours.
- You may export once every 24 hours.
Now imagine a Friday. You request the export before leaving. It completes on Saturday and emails you a link. You see the email on Monday morning. The link is dead, and you cannot simply retry and wait a few minutes — you start another 24-hour build.
That is two days gone from a notice period, and the pattern repeats if you miss it again. It is not a trap in the sense of being hidden — monday.com states all three limits — but it is a trap in the sense that people plan around one limit and get caught by the interaction of three.
Start it early in a working week, and watch for the email.
Admin-only, and what that means for staff
The full account export is available to account admins. An ordinary member cannot take it.
For the company this is correct — you do not want every member walking out with the whole account. For an individual it means your own work is not portable by you: a designer leaving a studio can export the boards they can see, one at a time, to Excel, and that is the extent of it.
monday.com also notifies every admin when an account export runs. That is a sensible control and worth knowing before you trigger one during a tense week, because it is not a quiet action.
The exclusion people notice second
Dashboards do not export, though the boards feeding them do.
That is a defensible line — a dashboard is a view, not data — but it means the reporting layer your managers actually look at has to be rebuilt from scratch wherever you land. If a dashboard represents a week of somebody's configuration work, screenshot it before you go, or write down what it aggregates.
The Emails & Activities timeline is the quieter loss. Teams that use monday.com for client communication accumulate correspondence there, and none of it is in the export. If that is where your client history lives, it is not coming with you and you should decide now whether that matters.
The files checkbox
monday.com offers to exclude files from the export to make it faster.
Tempting when you are watching a 24-hour clock, and almost always the wrong choice. Attachments are the part of a board that exists nowhere else — briefs, logos, signed documents, screenshots of things that have since changed. Board text can often be reconstructed from memory or email. A file cannot.
Leave the box unticked and accept the slower build, unless you genuinely hold those files elsewhere.
The verdict
21 out of 30. A real export with clearly documented gaps.
What holds it back is not the content — all boards including private ones, plus files, is a respectable haul. It is the delivery: admin-only, a 24-hour build, a 24-hour link, one attempt per day, and an archive that stays behind.
Every one of those is survivable with a fortnight's notice and none of them is survivable with two days'. That is the recurring lesson of this whole section, and monday.com is one of its cleaner illustrations.
For the buying decision rather than the leaving one, see Asana vs monday.com — and note that Asana's export report scores lower largely because Asana will not tell you what monday.com states outright.
Before you cancel
- Unarchive anything you want to keep before you export - archived boards are not in the file and nothing warns you.
- Start the export at least three days before you need it. It can take 24 hours to build.
- Download it the moment the email arrives. The link is valid for 24 hours and you can only request a new one once per day.
- Leave the file-exclusion box unticked unless you have another copy of your attachments - excluding files is faster and leaves them behind.
- Export any Workdocs by hand; they are not in the account export.
- Screenshot or separately export your dashboards, since only their source data travels.
- Warn your fellow admins first - every admin on the account is notified when you run it.
What we could not verify
- What file format the board data takes inside the account zip - the article does not say.
- Whether item update threads and comments are carried in the account export.
- Whether the export includes automation and integration configuration.
- Whether an archived board can be exported individually after being unarchived and re-archived.
These are open questions, not criticisms. Where a vendor does not publish an answer we leave it unscored rather than guessing, and the score is calculated only from what is documented.
Questions people ask
How do you export all your data from monday.com?
An account admin can download the entire account as a zip from the account settings. It contains all boards, shareable and private, plus files uploaded to boards. The process takes up to 24 hours and you receive an email with a download link valid for a further 24 hours.
Does a monday.com export include archived boards?
No. Archived boards are explicitly excluded from the account export, alongside Dashboards, Workdocs and the Emails & Activities timeline. This is the most consequential omission on the list, because archived is where finished client work usually sits - unarchive anything you want before exporting.
How long does a monday.com account export take?
Up to 24 hours to build, according to monday.com's own documentation, and the resulting download link is valid for 24 hours. You can also only run the export once every 24 hours, so a missed download window costs you a full day rather than a retry.
Can a normal user export monday.com data?
Not the full account export - that is admin-only. Individual boards can be exported to Excel separately. So a team member leaving with their own work must do it board by board, and only for boards they can see.
Is monday.com export available on the free plan?
The account export article states no plan restriction, which suggests it is available on every tier including the two-seat free plan. Worth confirming in the product before you rely on it, since the page addresses permissions rather than pricing.
Where this information comes from
Product details change often. Each item below links to the primary source we checked, so you can confirm anything that matters to your decision.
Vendors change their export tooling without announcing it. If something here no longer matches what you see in the product, tell us and we will re-check it.