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Messaging
Telegram
Updated Sep 29, 2026
Telegram is the messaging app that keeps your chats on its own servers, which is what makes an export possible at all and what makes some people nervous about having one. The download runs from the desktop app rather than the phone, writes straight to your own disk, and there is nobody to approve it. The catch is the default settings, which leave out most of what people assume they are getting.
What you'll get
Personal Chats and Saved MessagesContacts and Frequent ContactsActive and Web SessionsPhotos, Videos, Files, Voice MessagesStickers and StoriesChats You Have LeftYour IP and Account Change History
Before you start
- Use Telegram Desktop. The phone apps do not have the export and neither do the web clients. Telegram Lite, the browser and desktop client, does.
- Open Settings, then Advanced, then Export Telegram data.
- Look at what is ticked before you start, because the defaults are conservative. Personal chats, private groups, contacts, stories and profile photos are on. Bot chats, every kind of channel, sessions and the miscellaneous data are off. Photos are the only media type included.
- Check the file size limit while you are in there. It starts at 8 MB, which is low enough that a fair number of ordinary documents will be skipped without you being told in advance.
How to download
- Pick HTML, JSON, or Both. Most guides still only mention the first two, because Both is newer. It roughly doubles the disk and the time and it is the right answer: HTML to read, JSON to keep.
- Choose your chat categories. It is six types rather than a list of individual chats: personal, bot, private groups, private channels, public groups and public channels. There is no date range on a full export.
- Pick a folder and start it. There is no upload, no email, no link to wait for and nothing to approve on your phone. It writes straight to that folder on your own machine.
- Leave it running. It is a long sequential pull, so a heavy account is an hours job rather than a coffee break.
Pro tip
In a public group or channel, the export contains only the messages you sent. Not the ones you received, not anyone else's. Telegram states this as a rule and the option to change it is greyed out, so if a conversation lives in a channel you follow but never post in, the export will not have it.
After the download
- Keep the folder together. The HTML is a viewer rather than a self-contained page: it points at the media by relative path, so sending someone the .html on its own gives them a page full of broken images.
- Deleted messages are not in there and cannot be. You get what is in the chat at the moment you run it. That is also the argument for doing this on a schedule rather than once, because a copy you took before somebody deleted something still has it.
- Secret chats cannot be exported. Telegram has never written that down, but the feature is not in the Desktop client at all.
- Stars and TON are not in there either. A payment shows up as a message inside a chat and nowhere else, so there is no accounting record of what you spent.
- The export is not encrypted. It is a folder of plain files, and the HTML viewer is one double-click away from being picked up by anything on the machine that indexes files.
- It also carries your IP address history, every device session with its country and login times, your two-factor password hint, your old email addresses, and every site you have signed into with Telegram Login. Treat the folder like a password manager vault rather than a photo album.
- Files over the size limit are skipped rather than trimmed, and Telegram records the skip as a warning in the export. Check what got missed rather than finding out when you go looking for something.
- Store the archive in ProtonDrive or pCloud for an off-site backup