Getting your Instagram messages out while you still can

The timings, so you can plan backwards

These are Instagram's own published numbers, checked on 11 September 2026:

• It may take up to 30 days for them to email you an export link. Most people get theirs much faster, but up to 30 days is the stated ceiling and you cannot appeal it.
• When the export is ready you have 4 days to download it, from the Available downloads section of the export tool. Miss that window and you request it again and wait again.
• After you request deletion, the profile and everything in it is permanently deleted after 30 days, though Instagram notes the number of days in which you can cancel varies by region.
• The deletion process itself may take up to 90 days to complete once it begins.

So if you have a date by which the account must be gone, start the export at least a month before it, and watch your email. The link expiring is the most common way this goes wrong for people who did everything else right.

Where the export lives now

Meta has been moving people between two versions of the settings screen, and its own help page says you may see either Accounts Center or Meta Account settings. So the menu path depends on which one you have got.

On the app, tap your profile picture, then the menu at the top right, then Settings and privacy. At the top you will find either Accounts Centre or Meta Account. Open it, go to Your information and permissions, then Export your information or Download your information, depending on the version. Then:

1. Tap Create export.
2. Choose the profile you are exporting.
3. Choose Export to device. The other option sends it to a third-party service, which is not what you want here.
4. Choose what to include, the date range, the format, the email address to notify, and the media quality.
5. Tap Start export.

If the labels on your phone do not match these exactly, you are on the other version of the screen. The order of the steps is the same.

What to tick, if messages are what you care about

Exporting everything on a ten year old account produces a very large file, most of which is ad topic lists and login records. If the DMs are the point, choose messages specifically and leave the rest.

Set the date range to all time unless you know exactly what you want. Set media quality high if the photos in the conversation matter, and accept that the file gets much bigger.

On format, you are choosing between a readable version and a machine version. The HTML one opens in a browser and you can scroll it like a web page. The JSON one is the one software reads, and it is the one to pick if the messages are going into anything else afterwards. If you are not sure and you have the patience for two requests, ask for HTML now so you can read it, and JSON as well if you later need it processed.

What is in the zip when it arrives

Your conversations are under your_instagram_activity/messages/inbox, with one folder per conversation, named after the other person. Inside each folder is the message data and a set of subfolders for the photos and audio from that thread.

Two things about that folder catch people out. A long conversation gets split across several files, and they are not in the order you would expect: the file numbered 1 holds the most recent block, not the oldest. And the photos are stored beside the messages rather than inside them, so if you copy the message file out on its own, you have taken the words and left the pictures behind.

Keep the zip whole until you are done with it. It is the only complete copy you will have.

Why the names and emoji look broken

Open the export and you will probably find names like José and emoji rendered as strings of nonsense. Nothing has been lost. Meta's exporter writes the text as UTF-8 bytes escaped as though they were Latin-1, so every character above plain ASCII comes out double-encoded.

It can be decoded back exactly. What is worth knowing is that most free converters pass it straight through, so the PDF you generate somewhere else will have the same broken names as the raw file. If a converter's sample output shows a mangled accented name, that is your answer about whether it fixes this.

Facebook Messenger exports come out of the same exporter with the same defect, so if you are saving both, expect both.

What the export does not contain

Messages sent in vanish mode were never stored to be exported. Anything either of you deleted is gone. Instagram also notes that some information you have deleted may be kept temporarily for safety and security reasons, but it will not appear when you download your information, which amounts to the same thing from your side.

What does survive, and surprises people, is the record of things that are not text. An unsent message appears marked as unsent rather than vanishing without trace, and a call appears as a call with its duration. If the fact that a call happened matters to you, it is in there.

Deactivating instead, and reading it for free

If you are not certain, deactivating hides the profile without starting any clock. You can come back. Deletion is the one that ends with the export tool being unavailable to you.

Once you have the file, reading it costs nothing. The HTML export opens in any browser and shows the conversation as a web page. For a short thread that is genuinely the end of the job and you should stop there.

The reason people go further is that an HTML export is not a document. It does not paginate, it looks like a debug view, the photos are scattered through folders, and you cannot hand it to anyone or print it without it falling apart. Turning it into a dated transcript with the pictures in place is the tedious half.

Questions, answered.