Whatever you've built up in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Grok - research, code, drafts - lives on their servers, in their format, searchable only by their weak built-in search. If the account goes away, so does all of it. That bothers me, so I want to share the workflow I use to keep a local copy.

The approach:

• Export conversations to open formats - Markdown, JSON, plain text not a locked-in format. Markdown drops straight into Obsidian/Logseq; JSON is there if you want to process it yourself.
• Bulk-export to a ZIP instead of copy-pasting one chat at a time.
• Keep the archive in a folder you control (or your own cloud), so it's yours regardless of what the provider does.

Full disclosure so I'm not being sneaky: I build a browser extension (AI Toolbox) that does this, including local full-text search over your own history so you're not dependent on their search. I'm mentioning it because it's relevant, not to pitch - the export idea stands on its own, and you can do a lot of it by hand or with other tools too.

How do you all handle AI chat backups? Curious if anyone's got a fully FOSS pipeline for it.