How to Easily Backup ChatGPT – a Complete Guide

June 23, 2025

ChatGPT has quickly become an essential tool for developers, IT teams, and knowledge workers across industries. From drafting emails to debugging code, the insights generated in your conversations are often worth saving.

But there’s a catch: OpenAI doesn’t yet offer an automatic way to back up your data, and once a conversation is deleted, it’s gone for good.

At BackupLABS.io, we believe that AI-generated content is business-critical data. While we don’t currently support automated ChatGPT backups, we’re actively exploring ways to bring this feature to our platform.

In the meantime, here’s how you can manually back up your conversations.

Manual Export via ChatGPT (Official Method)

If you use ChatGPT through the web interface, you can export your data directly from OpenAI:

  1. Click your profile icon in the top right corner of the ChatGPT sidebar and select Settings
    chatgpt1

  2. Click Data Controls

  3. Click Export Data
    chatgpt2

  4. You’ll receive a .zip file via email containing all your conversations in .json format similar to this:
    chatgpt3

You can then open the chat.html file to view your chats from your web browser. Media files are stored in the yellow folder.

Pros:
✅ Easy to do
✅ Official method from OpenAI

Cons:
❌ Manual process
❌ Only exports occasionally
❌ No real-time or incremental backup
❌ No dates are displayed in the chat history

What’s Next?

We’re actively exploring ways to integrate ChatGPT conversation backup into the BackupLABS.io platform, so you can:

  • Automatically back up and version all your prompts and responses

  • Restore or audit past interactions

  • Store securely with cloud sync (Dropbox, Google Drive, S3)

Stay tuned for updates!

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