Exit Guide: leave ChatGPT with everythingExit Guide: leave ChatGPT with everything

Step by step (verified on June 10, 2026):

If the menu has moved since then, the official help article is the source of truth: How do I export my ChatGPT history and data?

What the export contains: conversations.json with your full message history, timestamps, model details and metadata, plus chat.html, a browser-readable version of the same data, and some account metadata.

What it omits: Memory entries are stored separately and are not included. Custom instructions are not reliably included. Shared links, project configurations and fine-grained settings do not come along. Export those by hand: open them in the UI and paste them into a markdown file.

Convert to markdown: conversations.json is one big JSON file. Turn it into one file per conversation, named by date and topic. Any scripting tool can walk the JSON; Pandoc handles the chat.html route. Suggested structure:

my-base/
  conversations/
    2026-06-11-project-kickoff.md
    2026-06-09-pricing-research.md
  notes/
    memory-entries.md
    custom-instructions.md
  prompts/
    weekly-review.md

Keep the files somewhere you control: a local folder, a git repository, or a synced drive, in that order of preference. Keep the base current: re-export monthly, or better, write new work directly into the base and treat the chat service as a scratchpad.

The principle that carries the movement: standard formats any model can read, today and in ten years. Your conversations in markdown are useful in every tool you will ever use. Your conversations inside a provider's database are useful exactly as long as that provider allows.