How to export your data from Discord

Requesting the GDPR export, what arrives, and how to open it.

easy Wait: up to thirty days

Discord is required to give you a copy of the data it holds about you, including messages and posts and social activity. The request itself is free, and arrives as .zip containing JSON and NDJSON. Typical wait: up to thirty days.

Discord privacy settings

Step by step

  1. Open User Settings, then Data and Privacy

    Scroll to Request all of my data.

  2. Choose what to include

    Messages, servers and activity are separate tick boxes. Include messages if you want your conversations.

  3. Submit the request

    Discord confirms by email.

  4. Wait up to thirty days

    It is usually faster, but Discord makes no promise short of a month.

  5. Download within thirty days

    The link stays live for a month after it arrives.

Opening your Discord export

Muletto reads a Discord export directly - the zip, without unpacking it first - and finds the messages and posts and social activity inside.

It runs in the browser: the archive is never uploaded, there is no account, and nothing is installed. Open several exports at once and they become one library, with the photographs that appear in more than one of them found automatically.

Your messages are in the package, which surprises people who expect otherwise - but only yours. A server's conversation is not exported to you, so a thread reads as your half of it with the replies absent. Anything you deleted by hand is gone from Discord and so is absent here too, and the package is a set of JSON files rather than anything readable, so it needs a tool to make sense of.

Open your Discord export

Worth knowing

Your messages are in the package, which surprises people who expect otherwise - but only yours. A server's conversation is not exported to you, so a thread reads as your half of it with the replies absent. Anything you deleted by hand is gone from Discord and so is absent here too, and the package is a set of JSON files rather than anything readable, so it needs a tool to make sense of.
Only your own messages are included. What other people wrote in the same conversation is not, so an exported chat reads as one half of it.
Attachments are links rather than files, and those links are signed and expire. By the time an old export is opened they are usually dead.
The activity folder is line-separated JSON rather than a JSON array, and for most accounts it is the bulk of the download.

Common questions

Does a Discord data export include other people's messages?

No. Only messages you sent. A conversation therefore reads as one side of itself, which surprises most people opening one for the first time.

Why are the images in my Discord export missing?

Attachments are stored as links rather than files, and Discord signs those links with an expiry. In an export more than a few days old they generally no longer resolve.

How long does a Discord data request take?

Up to thirty days by Discord's own wording. Most arrive well inside that, and the download link then stays live for another thirty.