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Messenger

Wait
Hours
You get
message_1.json files, in one or more .zip
Rough size
Hundreds of MB — nearly all of it attachments

Everything Buho reads out of it lands in Messages.

Your recent one-to-one conversations are encrypted, and Meta's ordinary export form does not carry them: they come from a second, separate download, which is the one to start with.

Messenger secure-storage export messenger.com ↗
  1. Open the secure-storage form above and unlock it with your Messenger PIN — the code you set when your chats were encrypted.
  2. Set the three settings above, then request the download.
  3. Meta emails a link when it is ready.

Get these right

Format
JSON
Date range
All time
Defaults to the last few months, which throws away most of your history.
Media quality
Low

Then get everything from before the encryption

The export above starts the day each chat was switched over — late 2023 for most accounts, through 2024 for the rest. Everything older, and every group chat, which were never encrypted, comes from Meta’s ordinary export form instead: Some of your information → Messages, with the same three settings. That one comes back in a few minutes. Drop both exports here; Buho merges them.

Meta's ordinary export form accountscenter.facebook.com ↗

Large exports are split into several zip files — download all of them and drop them here together, or you’ll be missing conversations.

Two downloads, not one. Each one-to-one chat was switched to end-to-end encryption on its own day — late 2023 for most accounts, through 2024 for the rest — and everything said since is only in the secure-storage export. Everything older, and every group chat, is only in the ordinary one. Drop both; Buho merges them.

Drop your export here

The .zip as it arrived, the unzipped folder, or loose files. Buho works out which export it is, so you never have to say — and reads it here, in this tab, without uploading any of it.