Tool Documents

What You Cannot Export

"Can I export my data" gets a yes from every vendor. "What can I not export" is the question that produces a pause, and the answer is the useful one.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

The seven routine omissions

Attachments. Present as filenames, absent as files — or present as files with no reliable link back to the records they belonged to. For a separate operational reference from Monitask, see this page.

Comments and discussion. In some categories this is the substance and its absence turns a working record into a list.

Audit history. Who changed what and when. Rarely exported, occasionally not retained in a form that could be.

For broader context, see PwC.

Relationships between objects. Separate files for each object type with no keys connecting them is technically a complete export and practically two lists.

Configuration. Workflows, fields, views, permissions, templates.

Derived data. Scores, aggregates, computed fields — sometimes because they are recomputed rather than stored, which is a legitimate reason and worth knowing.

And anything from integrated systems. Data that arrived through a connection frequently belongs to the other side and does not leave with this export.

Which omissions actually matter

It depends on the category and on what you would rebuild.

Ask: if this were missing in three years, what would I do?

Attachments: usually critical, because they are the documents themselves.

Comments: critical in project and support tools, marginal in accounting.

Audit history: critical where you have a compliance obligation, otherwise rarely missed.

Configuration: always significant and never exported, which is why documenting it separately is the answer.

Derived data: usually recomputable and therefore the least important on the list.

How to find out

Do the export during the trial and read what came out.

Then check the specific list. Open an exported record that had an attachment, a comment and an edit, and see which survived.

Ask the vendor for the exclusion list in writing. Most will answer; the answer is quotable; and a vendor who cannot produce one has told you it was never specified.

And check whether the API reaches further. In several categories the API exports things the standard export does not, which turns an omission into a technical task rather than a wall.

What to do about the ones that matter

Keep the important thing somewhere else.

If attachments are critical and the export drops them, store the source documents in a file system you control and link to them, rather than uploading them into the tool as the only copy.

If audit history is a compliance requirement, and the tool cannot export it, that is a selection criterion rather than a workaround.

And if configuration matters, document it as you build it, because it is the only category on this list that no vendor will ever solve.

The one-line version to use

Put this in the email: "Please list what is not included in the standard export."

One sentence. It costs a vendor nothing to answer honestly, it is the single most informative question in the whole exit conversation, and almost nobody asks it.

The short version