Hi r/computerforensics, I had a matter recently where I needed to forensically collect a user's entire ChatGPT history, projects, conversations, generated images, the whole thing. So I built a toolkit that attaches to a Chrome session via CDP, extracts the auth token, and hits ChatGPT's backend API directly. Every conversation gets saved as an individual JSON file with a SHA-256 hash recorded in a CSV manifest. There's a separate verification script that recomputes all hashes, post-collection, and flags any mismatches, missing files, or untracked artifacts.

A few things that made this harder than expected:

• ChatGPT only shows ~5 "pinned" projects in the sidebar API. The rest are hidden, so I had to build a multi-phase discovery process that paginates the sidebar endpoint AND scans the full conversation list to find project IDs the sidebar doesn't return.

• Conversations are stored as tree structures (not flat lists) with branch points for edits and regenerations. The tool walks the active branch from current_node back to root.

• Team/Enterprise workspaces require a separate account ID header or you only see personal data.

• Rate limiting is aggressive, so I built in exponential backoff with automatic retry.

I've also included a script to convert the JSON exports to formatted PDFs (useful for handing off to counsel). It also supports resume, so if it crashes or gets rate-limited mid-run, you re-run and it picks up where it left off.

Open-source for the community: https://github.com/loucdg/chatgpt-forensic-exporter

Even if you don't have a forensic use case right now, it's worth having for backing up your own ChatGPT data. OpenAI has a 24-48 hour delay and the format it exports in is not as usable as this.

This is my first time releasing a tool like this publicly. And yes, I heavily leveraged "vibe coding" to get it done but I've been happy with the results. I have a few other python scripts that I've used during matters that I will upload if there's interest.

Happy to answer questions or take feedback.