Preserving Your AI Conversations: How to Backup Your Data from AI Assistants
Backing up your data is essential, whether from social media platforms, YouTube, or AI assistants like ChatGPT. Here you can find a simple way to export and download your interactions from ChatGPT and other AI platforms.
Why is it important?
It will be interesting to see how these practices will evolve. As you will see below, clearly today OpenAI implements the best process and the most useful output. Others must catch up to offer a good user experience.
Exporting your ChatGPT data, and those from other AI platforms, ensures that your past interactions remain accessible. In the future, you may wish to feed this history into an advanced AI model to maintain continuity in your conversations and build upon previous discussions.
1. ChatGPT
To begin, open your ChatGPT settings and navigate to the Data Control section. Inside, you will find an option labeled 'Download Your Data.' Clicking this button will generate an export request, and within a few minutes, you will receive an email containing a link to download your data.
There is a direct link to the download screen.
Once you receive the email, clicking on the link will allow you to download a compressed ZIP archive that contains all your interactions. If the download fails or does not complete successfully, using a download manager can help ensure a stable and uninterrupted download. Specifically I use Free Download Manager with its Chrome extension which intercepts the click on the email and smoothly handles the process until its successful conclusion.
After downloading, extract the ZIP archive. Inside the extracted folder, you will find an HTML file, which you can open in any web browser to navigate through your past interactions easily. Additionally, a JSON file is included, providing a structured record of your conversations, more suitable to be ingested by other programs.
2. DeepSeek
DeepSeek at this link asks to write to service@deepseek.com to request a copy of your data. As you will see also below, this is the only way for many other platforms as well, currently. If you are a California or EU resident, it is your right to receive the data, and the platform is required to respond within 30 days to be compliant.
3. Microsoft Copilot
For Microsoft Copilot confusingly, there are three versions and two download links.
Crazily enough the export generates truncated text on the AI side. Eg. "Hello there! I’m Microsoft Copilot, your AI companion. I’m here to help with all kinds of tasks, fro..." Completely useless. Stay away if you want to preserve and build upon your conversation history!
4. Grok
Grok has a clear link to download your data on the account settings of Grok.com, which then redirects to the account management page on X.ai.
5. Claude
The data download for Claude is accessible here. Similar process as with ChatGPT, but the archive only has a JSON format in the ZIP file, making it less useful for those who are not technical enough to parse it. (Or smart enough to use an AI to parse it!)
6. Poe
Poe by Quora does not offer a way to download your data, or a clear link to request a copy of your data, which is non compliant in California and the EU. Go here or write to privacy@poe.com to request a copy of your data. They are required to respond within 30 days.
7. Perplexity
Perplexity's process is based on filling a form, with a 30 day response time.
8. You.com
You.com asks to write to privacy@you.com to request a copy of your data.
