Open your ChatGPT or Claude export, and read it all.

Which file should you drop?

It depends on the assistant, because ChatGPT and Claude don't package their exports the same way.

A ChatGPT export

OpenAI's email links to a single .zip file with a long name made of letters and numbers. Drop it as is. If you already unzipped it, you'll find chat.html and conversations.json inside: the second one is what matters, so drop it on its own.

chat.html already lets you reread your conversations in a browser, but all of them in a row, on one endless page, with no per-conversation search and no way to pull one out. That's usually how people end up here.

A Claude export

With Claude, the email leads to a list of files, each with its own link. The one holding your conversations is called conversations-000.zip. Download it and drop it here. Claude's export has no ready-made HTML page: without a tool, all you get is the JSON.

Why "conversations-000.zip", then 001, 002?

Claude splits large histories into parts numbered from zero: conversations-000.zip for the first, conversations-001.zip for the next, and so on. A lightly used account only gets 000. An account that has written every day for months gets several.

Each part holds one JSON file: a list of conversations, each with its title, creation date and the sequence of messages. The parts don't overlap, so you need all of them to get everything back. Here, drop them together, in one go: the tool reads them one after the other and sorts everything into the same list.

Two things trip up a lot of people: each link in the email works only once, and the email itself expires after 24 hours. Download every part in one sitting, before you close the page.

Requesting your export, if you haven't yet

ChatGPT: on chatgpt.com, click your profile in the bottom left, then Settings, Data controls, and Export next to "Export data". The email often arrives within minutes, but OpenAI says it can take up to 7 days, and the download link is only valid for 24 hours. The full walkthrough, traps included, is in how to export your ChatGPT conversations.

Claude: on claude.ai or in the desktop app (not on your phone), click your initials, then Settings, Privacy, Export data. To download the files, stay signed in to your Claude account in the same browser. It's all covered in how to export your Claude conversations.

What you see, and what's left out

Once the file is read, you get the list of your conversations, newest first, with their date, the assistant and the number of messages. Search looks through titles and message text, with or without accents. Click a conversation to read it in full, each message with its time.

Three buttons let you keep a copy: save the open conversation as Markdown (.md, handy for Notion, Obsidian or any text editor), as plain text (.txt), or save everything at once in a single .md file. Your browser builds the file and it lands in your downloads folder.

The tool shows the text you exchanged, nothing else. Images you sent or generated, code ChatGPT ran, Claude's thinking and its tool calls don't appear. In Claude's raw text, those blocks sometimes leave a sentence behind, "This block is not supported on your current device yet": the tool removes it. In ChatGPT, a conversation can hold several versions of the same reply when you regenerated it. Only the one you kept on screen appears.

Why nothing leaves your computer

Your export may hold years of questions, drafts and confidences. It has no business on a server, ours included. So the tool reads it in a small program that runs in your browser, separate from the page, and makes no network request. The zip is read in chunks, only the JSON files are decompressed, and nothing is kept once you close the tab.

You can check it yourself: load this page, turn off your Wi-Fi, then drop your file. Everything works. The site's analytics only count steps, such as "a file was read" or "a conversation was opened". Never a title, never a word of your conversations. The privacy policy goes into detail.

What next?

Keep your zip somewhere safe, in Documents rather than Downloads, which tends to get emptied without a second thought. If you ever delete conversations or your account, this file will be the only trace of those exchanges. The guide on backing up your conversations before deleting them covers it all.

And if, while rereading, you find conversations you'd like to hold in your hands, the Aveu studio reads exactly the same file, the same way, and turns it into a book of letters.