How to export your ChatGPT history, and what is in it

This page explains how to get your conversation history out of ChatGPT, what the export contains and leaves out, and how long OpenAI keeps your data. Last updated August 5, 2026.

Requesting the export

ChatGPT has one official way to get your history out in bulk. Profile icon, Settings, Data Controls, Export Data, then confirm. The export arrives by email as a download link. The link expires 24 hours after it arrives, and you must be signed in to the same account to download it. OpenAI states the export can take up to 7 days to arrive. It usually takes minutes to hours. Only one export request can be in progress at a time.

Exports are available on Free, Plus, and Pro accounts. ChatGPT Business and Enterprise use separate administrator export paths, and individual members cannot export their own history there.

There is no API for consumer conversation history. The developer platform is a separate product with no access to your chatgpt.com conversations. Tools that promise live export work by scraping the private web application, which is against the terms of service. The email export is the only legitimate bulk path.

What the ZIP contains

• conversations.json: your full chat history with metadata. This is the record.
• chat.html: the same history rendered for browsing.
• user.json: your account identifiers, including email and phone number. Treat the ZIP as sensitive and do not share it whole.
• message_feedback.json: your thumbs up and thumbs down ratings.
• shared_conversations.json: records of chats you created share links for.
• model_comparisons.json: appears in some exports, holds side by side response comparisons you were shown.

Exports also contain media folders, including generated images, but repeated exports from the same account have returned different, incomplete image sets. Only the JSON text record can be trusted to be complete.

Large exports arrive in pieces

Past a certain size there is no single conversations.json. The export splits your history into numbered files, conversations-000.json, conversations-001.json, and so on. OpenAI acknowledges the numbered files in its help documentation but publishes no threshold and no format specification. A multi year history of heavy use can produce a dozen shards in a ZIP of several hundred megabytes. Capsa reads both forms.

What the export leaves out

The export is your conversations and basic account data. It does not include what ChatGPT has recorded about you.

• Saved memories are not in the ZIP. You can view them in Settings under Personalization, but they do not export.
• The profile ChatGPT builds from your usage is not in the ZIP and not viewable anywhere: response preferences, notable past topics, inferred traits, and interaction metadata such as model usage patterns, device details, and activity rhythms. None of it can be inspected or exported through any official means.
• Conversations you deleted before requesting the export are not in it.

Retention, deletion, and the litigation

OpenAI’s stated policy: deleted conversations and deleted accounts are removed from its systems within 30 days, unless legal or security reasons require longer retention. Temporary Chats are deleted within 30 days automatically and are not used for training.

The legal exception has applied for over a year. In May 2025 a federal court ordered OpenAI to preserve all consumer output logs, including deleted ones, as part of the New York Times copyright case. The blanket hold was lifted as of late September 2025 and the 30 day deletion policy applies again to new deletions. Everything preserved during the hold remains preserved for the litigation, and accounts flagged by the plaintiffs remain on hold. In 2026 the court ordered production of 20 million anonymized consumer conversations to the plaintiffs, and a sanctions motion filed in July 2026 is pending.

Training: consumer chats on Free, Plus, and Pro are used to train OpenAI models by default. The switch is in Settings, Data Controls, Improve the model for everyone. Turning it off applies to future conversations. Everything before the switch was already eligible.

Keeping the record

Your export is the only complete copy of your ChatGPT history you can hold yourself. Drop the ZIP at capsa.hammerai.ai. The file is banked byte for byte as an original, sharded or not, and your conversations become browsable alongside every other AI tool you use. Conversations deleted before an export never appear in one, so the copy worth taking is the current one.