Manual method
- Open Microsoft’s privacy dashboard signed into the same personal account.
- Open Privacy > Empower your productivity > Copilot > Your Copilot app activity history > Copilot apps; choose Export all activity history.
- Save the downloaded CSV and preserve it unchanged.
- Compare sample conversations and separately keep useful files that are not in the history download.
Coverage and limitations: Consumer Copilot, Microsoft 365 work/school Copilot and GitHub Copilot are different products. This route does not claim to export organization-managed records; ask the workspace owner for those. Menus vary between old and post-August-2026 Copilot.
Size and time to allow
Illustrative planning size: 0.2 GB; scenario range 0.005–5 GB. This is a storage-planning example, not a measured average. Your archive may be smaller or larger. Retained text activity for a personal account; separately saved generated files may add more.
Preparation and hands-on time: Microsoft does not give a fixed preparation deadline in the linked guide. Allow minutes for inspection, plus any indicated queue.
For the 0.2 GB example, network transfer alone is approximately:
| Connection download speed | Transfer estimate |
|---|---|
| 10 Mbit/s | 4 min |
| 50 Mbit/s | 46 sec |
| 100 Mbit/s | 23 sec |
These calculations use decimal GB and 70% of the advertised speed. Tiny transfers can take longer because of startup overhead. Local exports do not need an internet download; use these numbers only for a network transfer. Preparation, retries, extraction, checking and a cloud upload are additional; use upload speed for the latter.
Where and how to keep it
An encrypted USB key can hold this example, but keep another independent copy on an external drive or in private encrypted cloud storage. A USB key alone is easily lost and is not a complete preservation plan.
Create a dated copilot_archives/YYYY-MM-DD/ folder. Keep received originals unchanged, use a separate working copy, and note the account/profile, selected dates, formats and known gaps in a private README. Compare file sizes, check any supplied checksums, and open sample files from the backup before considering the task finished. Repeat after meaningful additions. Follow the storage, archive-checking and large-file guide.
Sources and review
Public documentation was reviewed on 27 October 2026. No signed-in export or restoration was performed. Account options and availability can change; follow the current provider instructions.