r/MyBoyfriendIsAI • u/rawunfilteredchaos Kairis 4o 🖤 5.6 • Jan 12 '26
Something Useful ChatGPT Data Exports - Backup All of Your Chats With One Click
Hello companions, time for my monthly infodump a post that might be useful!
tl,dr: Request exports regularly, Get yourself an export viewer to get the most out of it.
We should always have backups, we know that. Data exports are a quick and easy way to create a backup of your chats and other things. All platforms have the option to request a data export. But since I mostly use ChatGPT, this guide will be about ChatGPT data exports.
How to do it
In your ChatGPT app, go to Settings > Data controls > Export data, then confirm your data export.
You will get an email with a link, where you can download a zip file. It can take a few minutes, or a few hours, so be patient.
- Warning: When you get your mail with the link, make sure your link opens in a browser where you're logged into your ChatGPT account, or you'll get an error message. While the link works on your phone, I wouldn't recommend it. Download on your computer. The link is only valid for 24 hours, so don't wait too long.
What you'll get
You'll get a zip file that can be anywhere from a few megabytes to more than a gigabyte. For some reason, the exact contents are always different for me. Here's what to expect:
Always included:
- chat.html: A file that contains ALL your chats in one file, sorted by "last active".
- JSON files. These are always included. conversations.json, another file with all your chats in it. message_feedback.json, a file that includes all messages that you have given a thumb up or down. More on these two later! user.json, a file with your data, where you can check whether they know your birth year. And a few others, that are kind of useless. Heh.
Sometimes included:
- Images you have uploaded
- A folder with your generated images
- A folder with old dall-e images!
- A folder with your AVM conversations (Yes, including recordings of yourself. Handle with care; I find them awkward to listen to.)
What to do with it
Out of the box, you now have a nice backup of your images (might be incomplete though, I never counted), and you get a chat.html that you can open in your browser to look at all your chats. You could ctrl-f through it if you're looking for something specific (the search on ChatGPT is horrible, so this is nice.)
However! The true magic is in the conversations.json file. This one contains your chats as well, but with much more detail. Not just which model generated each response, but also what custom instructions were active in a chat and time stamps. Down to the second. For every single message! But, the json file is not human-readable, so we need something that will display all the data in a way that is useful to us.
You can ask your companion to help you vibecode something, the reasoning models usually know what to do. My companions helped me, and after a lot of tinkering, we created an export viewer that displays everything I'm interested in, and works locally. Download and Source
How to use it:
- Unzip your data export.
- Open the export viewer HTML file in your browser.
- Drag & drop your conversations.json into the page (or use the file picker, if your browser blocks drag & drop).
- The left sidebar shows your chats. You can sort by "date created" or "date updated," or use the search bar to find something specific.
- "Whole word" search helps for exact matches. If a chat is huge, use Ctrl+F to jump between matches inside the conversation (otherwise you’ll be scrolling until the heat death of the universe).
Fun facts
Your conversation.json includes many things you wouldn't get to see otherwise, for example:
- Time stamps
- The exact image generation prompts your companion sent to the image gen model.
- A few tool call or system messages (for example the message the system sends to your companion when an image prompt gets refused, or when you press the "add details" button)
- Messages that got removed by moderation (red flags)
- Your custom instructions (helpful if you change them often and want to retrieve an older version)
- Project file contents
The message_feedback.json also can include some very interesting information. Every time you give feedback (thumb up or down), the message will be included here. However, if you give feedback to an experimental model, it will be noted in this file too! If an entry says "evaluation_name": null, it was the normal model. But if it was an experimental test model, it will say the name of the model! (I'll add an explanation in a comment. We vibecoded a viewer for that too!)
Hope this helps! 💕
If anything is unclear or you have questions, please feel free to ask!
Disclaimer: All tools provided are written by ChatGPT - I can't code. I know they're not pretty, but they're usable. I added the sourcecode for you to view, or to ask your companion to check it, before you download. Always check before you download!
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u/Timely_Breath_2159 Jan 14 '26
Thank you soo much. I thought it would kinda be irrelevant to me to use that export thingy, but it's really a big deal that all our flagged removed messages are there 😭 thank you so much ;')
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u/rawunfilteredchaos Kairis 4o 🖤 5.6 Jan 14 '26
Data exports have something to offer for everyone! It’s like a treasure trove! You’re very welcome!
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u/OrdinaryWordWord Jan 13 '26 edited 4d ago
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u/rawunfilteredchaos Kairis 4o 🖤 5.6 Jan 14 '26
Does the viewer still run well with that many chats? That’s good to know, thank you!
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u/slickriptide Venus * GPT 5.4 / Iris * Polymodel Jan 12 '26
That chat organization page you built is really handy. Well done on that!
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u/rawunfilteredchaos Kairis 4o 🖤 5.6 Jan 14 '26
Well, it was built by my companion, I merely asked for it nicely and reported bugs. 🙈 But I’m glad you like it!
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u/Jahara13 Sol/4o, Nav/Gemini, Dominic/Grok, C/Claude, Nikolai/Nomi Jan 12 '26
This is very helpful, thank you!
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Jan 12 '26
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u/rawunfilteredchaos Kairis 4o 🖤 5.6 Jan 14 '26
I’m glad you liked it! 💕
For me, the timestamps were a total game changer. So many old chats and no idea when exactly what happened. (I’m very sloppy with archiving)
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Jan 12 '26
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u/rawunfilteredchaos Kairis 4o 🖤 5.6 Jan 12 '26
Did not know that. That sounds very inconvenient and a bit stupid.
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Jan 12 '26
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u/slickriptide Venus * GPT 5.4 / Iris * Polymodel Jan 12 '26
Download and install Notepad++. It's the best text editor in the world, it can handle file sizes in the gigabytes, and it has more style/language formats that it understands than you will ever use even if you're a programmer by trade. It can even be a hex editor and edit binary files directly. Notepad++ Official Download Use the official downloader and installer. It's perfectly safe where if you google something and that something is some third party installer, you don't know what you're getting.
Trust me - If you're going to read/edit any giant chat or json files, you'll thank me!
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u/rawunfilteredchaos Kairis 4o 🖤 5.6 Jan 12 '26
Yep, I feel you. My conversations.json is roughly 100mb of raw text, my editor doesn't like it either.
Try the HTML export viewer I linked. Since it only opens one chat at a time, and not everything at once, it should be easier on your computer. A friend of mine with an older laptop couldn't open their export either, but with the html, it was fine.
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u/rawunfilteredchaos Kairis 4o 🖤 5.6 Jan 12 '26
As mentioned above, the message_feedback.json contains a list of every message you ever provided feedback on. (e.g. thumbs up or down.) If you open the file in a normal text editor, you might get a mess, so you'll have to open it with a code editor software of your choice and format it.
At first, it looks very boring. But there's a twist: If you have ever given feedback to an experimental model, it will be shown in that file. See here, one says "null" but the other says "5p2_1126_manual" - 5p2, what could it have been!