← Back to all services
Social
Bluesky
Updated Oct 13, 2026
Bluesky is a decentralised social network built on the AT Protocol, the open standard for portable social accounts. The export reflects that: one CAR file, and the file is your account, not a folder of read-only documents.
What you'll get
Every Post You WroteRepostsLikesFollowsLists, Blocks & MutesProfile & HandleOne CAR File, Whole Repo
Before you start
- Open Settings and look for Export my data. It is a section of its own rather than something buried under Privacy and Security, and it sits in the same place on web and mobile.
- Have somewhere to put the file before you start. It arrives as a single CAR, not a folder, and double-clicking it will not do anything useful.
- If you have a large account, clean up before you start. There is a cap on how large a repo Bluesky will package, and the export silently fails above it. Deleting old posts and bulk likes is the usual way back under.
How to download
- Click Download CAR file. The download starts immediately, with no queue, no support ticket, and no email to wait for.
- Watch what arrives. You get one .car file, not a folder, and it lands in your browser's default download location. The filename is usually your handle and a timestamp.
- Check the file size against the repo size on the same settings page. A file that is dramatically smaller than the page reports is truncated, not partial.
- The file is the live account at the moment you click, not a snapshot from earlier. Posts, likes, follows and blocks you make between clicking and the download finishing are not in it, and anything you remove will be.
- If the button silently fails, you have a large account. There is a cap on how large a repo Bluesky will package, and the failure is silent. Deleting old posts and bulk likes is the usual way back under.
Pro tip
A CAR file is a content-addressable archive, the same family of format as IPFS, and it holds the repo rather than a flattened dump of it. That means posts, likes, follows, blocks, lists and your profile are all in there, signed by your DID. What is not in there is every image and video you posted: the records point at them by hash, but the files themselves live on Bluesky's CDN and have to be fetched separately.
After the download
- Expect no preview. A CAR is a binary archive in the IPLD format, so your operating system will not recognise the extension and there is nothing to open it with. That is normal rather than a sign the download failed.
- To read it, use @atcute/repo from npm. It is open source, it runs on your own machine, and it walks the records for you. Anything that reads a repo rather than just a list of posts will pair each record with its key, which is the part you want.
- Do not hand the file to a website to read for you. The CAR is enough to reconstruct your public record, and there are perfectly good tools that run locally instead.
- The images and video are not in the file. The records reference them by hash and nothing more, so if the pictures matter, fetch them from the CDN while the account still exists.
- Direct messages are not in there either, and cannot be, since they belong to the other person as much as to you.
- There is a known open bug in the AT Protocol tooling around re-creating record keys from an exported CAR. Importing into another account can be fiddly for that reason, so keep the file even after you have got what you need out of it.
- Because this is a repo and not a pile of documents, it is the one export here that another AT Protocol server could actually take, self-hosted ones included.
- Store the archive in ProtonDrive or pCloud for an off-site backup
- Not sure where to store your export? See our backup guide.