how to export your Claude conversations - and the one trap in the file

The steps

1. Open claude.ai (or the desktop app) and open Settings.
2. Go to Privacy. (Direct link: claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls.)
3. Click Export data.
4. Wait for the email from Anthropic, then download and unzip it.

The download link is active for 24 hours. After that you request the export again.

What is in the zip

• conversations.json - every conversation and message.
• users.json - basic account information.
• projects.json - your projects, for plans that have them.

The format, and the trap

Claude's export is much friendlier than ChatGPT's. Each conversation has a uuid, a name, timestamps, and a chat_messages array that is already the linear conversation in order. There is no branching to resolve, no tree to walk. Every message has a sender of human or assistant and an ISO timestamp.

The trap is in how the message body is stored, because there are two copies of it.

Each message has a flat text field and a structured content array of typed blocks. The text field is a rendering of the message rather than its source, and where a message contained a block the exporter cannot serialise - a thinking block, a tool call, a tool result - it substitutes a fenced code block containing the literal sentence:

This block is not supported on your current device yet.

So an answer where Claude searched the web comes back with two or three of those pasted through the middle of it. The prose is not lost, but it is interrupted by apologies.

The fix is to read the content blocks instead. The text blocks in there carry the same prose with none of the placeholders, and the thinking and tool blocks can simply be skipped. We checked this against a real export: the structured blocks contained exactly the same answer, minus precisely the placeholder text. If you are using a converter and your exported answers are littered with that sentence, that is why - it read the easy field rather than the right one.

What the export does not include

Worth knowing before you rely on it:

• Memory is not included. What Claude remembered about you across chats does not come out in the standard export.
• Project knowledge files come out as text extracts, not as the original PDFs or documents you uploaded.
• Attachments are named in the file, with the extracted text for documents, but the original files are not bundled.

What you can do with the file

• Keep it as a backup. The JSON is readable and simple enough to grep.
• Convert it to Markdown with one of several open-source viewers and extractors.
• Import it into another AI chat app, which is what most people are exporting for.

Moving your Claude history into evenfall

evenfall reads a Claude export directly. Settings, then Account, then Import conversations, pick Claude, and drop in the zip - no unzipping, no finding conversations.json yourself. Conversations arrive with their original names and dates, sorted into your history where they belong rather than piled at the top with today's date.

It reads the structured blocks rather than the flat text field, so none of those placeholder sentences make it into your imported chats. Where Claude used a tool, the fact that it searched is kept as a note the assistant can read but you do not see, so a continued conversation still knows where its facts came from instead of referring to search results that vanished.

As with any import here: the file is parsed in your browser, so the blocks that get dropped never leave your device, and importing is free on every plan. Re-importing a later export adds only the conversations that are new.

Attachments and images do not transfer - the file names are preserved in the text so the conversation still makes sense, but the files themselves are not copied.

If you are comparing, evenfall vs Claude lays out where each one wins.

Exporting from evenfall too

Worth saying, since this page is about not being locked in: evenfall exports your data the same way, in one click from Settings, with no emailed link and no waiting. The zip contains every conversation in a readable format plus your personas, notes and settings - and the conversations file deliberately uses the same field names as Claude's, so tools that already read a Claude export can read ours, and you can import it back.

An export that only works on the way in is not portability.