How to back up your Character.AI chats before anything changes (and where to go next)

Who this is for. The backup steps work for every Character.AI user, including teens: there is a section for under-18s further down. The “where to go next” section names apps that are for adults only, and some links there are affiliate links, marked as such.

How this guide was made. We did not request or open an export ourselves. The steps come from Character.AI’s help centre and blog; the problems come from users’ own posts on r/CharacterAI between 13 and 26 October 2026, linked so you can read them; the tool details come from the tools’ own listings.

The dates that matter. Character.AI started a voluntary Chapter 11 process on 12 October 2026 to sell the company, and its blog says the sale should be “complete by the end of November or perhaps early December 2026”; if no suitable bid comes, “the platform will be wound down.” The proposed bid deadline is 20 November (see what the 30 October hearing decides). The help centre says an export “can take 3-4 weeks”, so a request made today should arrive before the end of November, and its link lasts 7 days. For what a sale could mean for your chats, see what happens to your chats in the sale.

Step 1: Request the official export today

Character.AI’s help centre (updated 8 October 2026) gives these routes:

• On the website: Profile, Profile Settings, Account, Manage Account & Data, Export Data.
• In the app: Profile, the Settings icon, Legal & Privacy, Export Data.

The download link goes to the email address on your account. The help centre says “exports can take 3-4 weeks to process” and that “the link will be valid for 7 days from the time the email is sent.” Some users reported receiving theirs within about a week of the 12 October news; others are still waiting. The subreddit’s moderators said on 19 October that sending more than one request “is not a problem.”

Do not delete your account while you wait. Deletion is permanent, and nothing official says what happens to a pending export if the account is gone.

Step 2: Copy what you cannot lose, by hand, now

The official export is the only complete record Character.AI offers, but users report gaps (see below). For the few things you would hate to lose, make your own copy while the site still works:

1. Characters you made: open each one’s edit page and copy the name, greeting, description and definition into a text document.
2. Your persona and any lorebook entries: expand them and save the page (Ctrl+S on Windows, Cmd+S on a Mac), or copy the text.
3. The chats that matter most: scroll to the start, select and copy into a document, one file per character. Long chats take a while; start with the most important.
4. Name the files clearly (character, date) and keep them in one folder.

This is slow, but it is the one method that does not depend on Character.AI’s export or on anyone else’s software.

Optional: the CAI Tools browser extension

The most widely mentioned backup tool on the subreddit is CAI Tools, an open-source browser extension by Muhammed İrşat. Its Firefox listing (version 3.8.3, updated 15 October 2026, 5,814 users, rated 4 out of 5 from 35 reviews) says it exports chats in formats that SillyTavern and similar tools read, and characters as JSON or PNG cards. Before you install it, know what it asks for: access to your browser tabs, to “your data for sites in the character.ai domain” and to a third-party domain, chatbotmanager.net. The listing also says “some features may require payment.” One user reported on 17 October that it would not download the full history of a bot with more than 1,000 chats. We have not reviewed its privacy policy. If you use it, install it from the official Firefox or Chrome store only, never from a link in a comment.

When the export arrives: the problems users are reporting

Since about 20 October the questions on r/CharacterAI have shifted from “how do I export?” to “what is this file?” Here is what users report, and what helps.

Read your export offline (not in another AI app)

The most common tip in the threads is to upload the export to ChatGPT and ask it to sort the chats. It works for some people, but it hands your private, sometimes intimate, conversations to another company under its own data terms. Reading the file on your own computer avoids that:

1. Extract the zip first (Windows: right-click, Extract All; Mac: double-click).
2. Open the small files in a text editor and look for your own email address, to confirm the export is yours.
3. Open the big file in Firefox (drag it into a tab for a collapsible view) or Visual Studio Code, and search for a character’s name.
4. Turn it into plain text with the short Python script in our guide to the Character.AI data export file, which also explains JSON versus JSON Lines.

Once downloaded, these files do not depend on Character.AI’s servers: they will still open if the platform closes. Keep two copies, one off your main device (an external drive or an encrypted folder), and do not share the folder with anyone.

If you are under 18

Everything in Steps 1 and 2, and the export fixes above, is for you too. The apps in the next section are for adults, so they are not suggestions for you, and nothing in this section links to them. A few extra points:

• If you need an email to arrive and it goes to a parent’s or school account, ask the account owner to help you find it.
• Under-18 accounts lost open-ended chat on Character.AI from late November 2025, so your older chats may only be in the export or in what you copy by hand.
• If losing these chats is upsetting, that is a normal reaction to losing something you spent time on. Talking it through with someone you trust can help.

Where to go next (adults)

You do not have to leave Character.AI to have a plan B, but if you want one, pick by what you would miss. Character.AI’s export does not import into other apps with any documented tool, so expect to rebuild a character from its description rather than move chats across.

• Nothing to lose again: SillyTavern with CAI Tools. SillyTavern is free, open-source software that keeps characters and chats on your own computer, and CAI Tools exports into its formats. It takes some setup and you bring your own AI model.
• The same kind of big character library: SpicyChat. It is an adult, NSFW-first platform, so it is not a fit if you want a family-friendly app. Its free tier has no published message cap.
• One companion with images and voice: Candy AI. You can rebuild a character with its creator. Paid plans start at $3.99 a month on the 12-month plan (checked 26 October 2026), and images and voice use tokens. See our Candy AI review.
• Voice and video calls: Nectar AI. It added video calls on 15 October 2026 and has a free plan; calls are a paid feature.
• One long-term companion with memory: Nomi or Kindroid. We have no affiliate deal with either. See Nomi vs Replika.

For a full comparison by need, see switching from Character.AI and Character.AI alternatives.

What we could not confirm

• What the official export contains. The help centre does not say, and users’ accounts conflict.
• The zip password. No official answer had been posted by 26 October 2026.
• How the sale ends. The bids, the buyer and what happens to user data are not decided; we did not read the court filings ourselves.
• CAI Tools’ data handling. We read its store listing, not its privacy policy or code.