OnwardAIAURiXOnwardAIAURiXYou asked for your data and a zip arrived. Here is what is actually in it, read off our own exports, not off a brochure, and what to do with the part that matters.
Every conversation you kept, in one file. Each conversation is stored as a tree of messages: every time you edited a question or pressed “regenerate”, the export keeps the branch you left as well as the one you ended on. A reader that follows only one path drops the rest. One year of one person’s ChatGPT, 257 conversations and 49,677 messages, came to a 12.9 MB zip.
A chat.html that shows the same conversations in a browser (slow to open when the file is big), small files for your account, your thumbs-up and thumbs-down, and your shared links. Images and files you uploaded can arrive as files beside them.
Our own export, opened and counted; the message count is measured, not estimated.
conversations.json: every conversation, messages in order, no branches. users.json: one line, your account. A projects/ folder with one file per project you made. Ten conversations came to 1.5 MB.
Not in it: Cowork sessions, the desktop work sessions with your folders and scheduled tasks. There is no export button for them. What that means and the door that still opens →
Drop the zip on the RECLAiM portal → free, inside your browser, nothing uploaded: dated, readable pages, one per conversation. On your own computer for keeps: RECLAiM, $19, every branch of an edited ChatGPT chat walked, each page stamped with an integrity hash, with a free receipt that checks the rebuild against your own file with the network shut. Then SiFT, $29 searches every word of it at once. See a rebuilt record made from a sample export →
Why bother? Because your record is yours. Accounts close, policies change, companies get acquired. A copy on your own machine answers to nobody. ← OnwardAI · the store · how to export · how it all fits