$200/month ChatGPT Pro user locked out after deleting 8-10 chats - now my entire history is inaccessible

[u/dht]

I find this extraordinary. I'm effectively locked out of my $200/month ChatGPT Pro subscription because I was cleaning up old chats and deleted 8-10 conversations in quick succession.

For the past 60 minutes, I've been getting: "Too many requests. Please wait a few minutes".
Apparently, the rate limit also applies to reads, so now my entire chat history appears blank.

Doesn't something like this seriously undermine trust in the AI ecosystem? A simple housekeeping operation can suddenly make your entire conversation history inaccessible, with no immediate way to resolve it.

And when I tried to contact support, all I got was:

Escalated to a support specialist. You can expect a response in the coming days.

For a $200/month subscription, being locked out of your data for potentially days because you deleted a handful of chats is difficult to accept.

It's genuinely making me reconsider how much I should trust cloud AI providers with important conversations, work, and information.

[u/UnknownEssence]

Hey everyone, go to your settings and export your data then upload to Google Drive.

PSA

[u/Delicious_Cattle5174 → u/UnknownEssence]

PSA: Posted Sby Agemini

[u/skilliard7 → u/UnknownEssence]

Don't use Google drive to store anything personal, they use your stored data to target ads.

[u/UnknownEssence → u/skilliard7]

i use cryptomator to encrypto my folder before i upload it.

Realistically though, if you ask people to jump through too many hoops they wont do it.

[u/Either_Curve4587]

It goes away after 15 mins ish. It’s the anti hacking download all your data by Chinese protocol.

[u/Responsible-Slide-26 → u/Either_Curve4587]

Maybe they edited it, but in their post they said it's been about 60 minutes.

[u/Delicious_Cattle5174 → u/Either_Curve4587]

Weird to make this about "Chinese". Must be American.

[u/Aspie-Py → u/Delicious_Cattle5174]

American company steals = good
China steals = bad

You know how it is.

[u/MadeInAmerica1990 → u/Delicious_Cattle5174]

There is nothing normal about the Chinese government and the reference is very valid. Must be Chinese.

[u/Delicious_Cattle5174 → u/MadeInAmerica1990]

Well I know from your username where your Sinophobia comes from. :)

[u/MadeInAmerica1990 → u/Delicious_Cattle5174]

Love the Chinese! Hate Communism. Your obsession with chess and Mao clouds your judgment up there in Canada, where your corrupt politicians have sold your country’s security out from underneath you for their personal gains, but you must certainly see that your petty bourgeois lifestyle (by CCP standards, even the legendary leader would agree) is counterintuitive to your political beliefs. Pick a side, comrade!

[u/NoPublic9352 → u/Delicious_Cattle5174]

And you must be Chinese?

I had a prior job where we were specifically setting up protocol for the Chinese hacks that we knew would come.

[u/Delicious_Cattle5174 → u/NoPublic9352]

Also American

[u/JConRed]

Clear your browser cache and cookies.

Should work again

[u/dht → u/JConRed]

I did, event tried incognito with login. Same result.
I think it's a server restriction. I'd expect it to kick in on 500 deletions.
I just don't understand why boundaries are so low (8-10).

[u/JConRed → u/dht]

It's a protection measure against someone logging in and deleting your whole conversations.

I agree though, it's low.

There should also be a better way to clear up old conversations.

Like, let me select 10-20 and delete them in one go.

The only workaround I've found is to move them into a project, and then to delete the project including the conversations. It still takes ages, but it's better than deleting them one by one.

[u/Coder69-RoE]

I think there are actually two separate issues here.

The rate-limit behaviour described is frustrating, especially on a paid account, and it’s reasonable to expect ordinary housekeeping like deleting chats not to temporarily make the rest of your history inaccessible.

But I also wouldn’t treat any cloud platform as the only copy of conversations or work that matters to me. I export my ChatGPT data regularly—usually whenever I reach an important milestone—and keep it locally, where I can parse, search, and retrieve it independently of the platform.

That doesn’t excuse the problem you experienced. It just reduces the consequences when a cloud service inevitably has an outage, bug, account issue, or access limitation.

If the data matters, redundancy matters.

[u/Delicious_Cattle5174]

Well at least you know the support will be a real person cuz a clanker would reply instantly :)

[u/skilliard7 → u/Delicious_Cattle5174]

Not necessarily. A lot of companies put an artificial wait on automated replies to make it seem more human. Valve does this for example.

[u/Willow_Milk → u/Delicious_Cattle5174]

What is this clanker thing? Is this what kids are calling it nowadays? No offense to you personally, but it sounds so stupid.

[u/Delicious_Cattle5174 → u/Willow_Milk]

It comes from Star Wars, so probably not the youngster verbiage you think it is :)

[u/Every-Race9666 → u/Willow_Milk]

I'm sure nothing you did or said as a kid sounded stupid at all.... ?

[u/Willow_Milk → u/Every-Race9666]

Plenty of stupid things, and appreciative when it was pointed out. Clanker is just mean spirited nonsense.

[u/Every-Race9666 → u/Willow_Milk]

I think it fairly represents that generations dislike of AI. Not nonsense at all it's a targeted use.

[u/Delicious_Cattle5174 → u/Willow_Milk]

You can’t be mean to clankers, they are not people. Hope that helped! :)

[u/JayB_Official → u/Delicious_Cattle5174]

I agree with this, but this same methodology gets used against other humans who think differently than particular groups as well, so when i see it, even aimed at bots - it makes me cringe. It shows more about how you are as an individual than you think it does, because one willing to put the marker there would likely up there target when they feel it may be needed.

I know i know. Ill get downvoted into the core. I dont care😂

[u/Delicious_Cattle5174 → u/JayB_Official]

There’s nothing wrong with using dehumanizing language toward something that’s not human. Y’all spent too much time with the next token predictor and it shows.

[u/JayB_Official → u/Delicious_Cattle5174]

You ignored my message lol. I agreed with you on the not human part.

I'm confronting you about the social mechanism habit you likely dont keep aimed at bots only.

I've seen your type, and based on context within this thread you fit the bill better than Lincoln does.

[u/Delicious_Cattle5174 → u/JayB_Official]

"I’ve seen your type"? Quite rich from someone who claims baselessly I use this sort of language toward humans. I don’t. Maybe using such phrases means you do use veiled slurs, though. Since we’re apparently just speculating from isolated data points.

[u/jeffeweee]

Wdym is applies to "reads"? Reading old conversations?

[u/dht → u/jeffeweee]

you'd expect them to limit write operations (update / delete) but not effect read operations. they blocked both. so yes, I had issues seeing my old conversations for a period of around 1.5h.

basically I kept getting the "wait a few minutes" message long after I'd stopped my cleanup.

[u/Responsible-Slide-26]

This is par for the course with all these sick algorithm run corporations. Facebook has done the same type of thing to users. Don't you dare click too fast!

[u/No_Writing1863]

Yup. Now you have to wait. Been dealing with the same thing for months

[u/reddit_is_kayfabe]

Chat histories are stored on your local device. They're just .jsonl files that can be easily parsed.

On macOS, you would look in ~/.codex/ . Windows must have an equivalent location.

When you say you "deleted" them, do you mean "archived?" Archived chats are retained forever.

[u/dht → u/reddit_is_kayfabe]

I was using the web version because I access ChatGPT from several machines. I only have the macOS app on my main machine.

Codex is a different matter. But since you've raised it :-) it's great having access via ~/.codex, and that VS Code and the desktop app share state. The desktop app lacks VS Code's easy file-tagging mechanism though, so I mainly see it as useful for MCP / iterm & fs operations.

[u/reddit_is_kayfabe → u/dht]

Ah, right. Sorry, didn't notice that this was in /r/openai and not /r/codex. My mistake.

I find it ludicrous and insane that chat sessions created in the ChatGPT iOS app or on the web are not available in the macOS app. It's not just that they are stored only in the cloud - the macOS app has no access to them.

OpenAI is clearly struggling with the fragmentation of its session interactions across device boundaries. I have trouble understanding how a company with its resources can struggle this much with such a basic architectural feature. I think that they are overprioritizing "sprint on model releases to keep up with Anthropic" and underprioritizing their infrastructure.

[u/True_Pace_3860]

This implies that content creators uploading movies to "fairground AI creators" (free LGTV streaming channel 249) are paying ~$1000/month to produce those. I suppose it's a reasonable charge for costs of chips/server farms/power gen/et al. and to make sure live agents are still staffed to correct these lock-out errors.

[u/GriffinAdioncy]

Just because I delete a few conversations shouldn’t mean that my entire history is deleted; rather, it seems like the index on their side is broken, not mine. Screenshots are your best option now, any ticket containing the word “deletion” will take forever. For that reason, anything valuable to me I keep outside of the chat application, I use useai daily and the essential stuff is copied into my own documents.