Exporting from the app
- 1Open Bluesky and go to Settings.
- 2Find Account, then "Export my data".
- 3Confirm. A file named after your DID, ending in .car, downloads to your device.
- 4That file is your entire repository: posts, replies, reposts, likes, follows, blocks, lists and profile.
What the export does not include
Your photos and videos are not in it. In AT Protocol, media lives outside the repository as separate blobs, and your export only holds references to them. Bluesky's own documentation confirms this: to get a complete copy of your account you have to fetch the blobs separately.
Also absent: direct messages, mutes, and your list subscriptions, none of which live in the public repository.
Then what?
Drop the file into the box above. You will see your whole archive immediately, along with a count of exactly how many media files exist and how many megabytes they come to — the ones your export is missing.
From there you can download those media files, and convert everything into whatever you actually want: readable Markdown, an Obsidian vault, a Notion workspace, a WordPress blog, a PDF, or plain JSON and CSV.
You can skip the export entirely
Repositories are public and unauthenticated. Typing your handle above fetches the same data directly, which is faster and avoids having a file you have to keep track of.
Questions
- How long does the export take?
- The download itself is usually seconds to a couple of minutes depending on account size. Large accounts produce files in the tens of megabytes; a very active three-year account we tested came to 75 MB with over 200,000 records.
- Is the export the same as a backup?
- Not quite, because of the missing media. A .car file plus a media pack is a genuine backup; the .car alone is a backup of your words but not your pictures.