ChatGPT Lost Months of My Work.
The worst thing that can happen when you trust AI with serious work just happened to me.
I upgraded to ChatGPT Pro 5x. Then almost 90% of the months of work inside the most important Project I was building disappeared.
The Project is still there. The chat is still there.
But most of its brain is gone—and I have no way of knowing what else vanished.
I had one extremely long conversation inside this ChatGPT Project. I was using it to plan and build almost the entire project alongside my regular work.
It contained months of research, product decisions, ideas, corrections, accepted and rejected features, files and the reasoning behind almost everything.
After upgrading through the mobile app, I discovered that almost 90% of the conversation was missing.
I deleted nothing. I archived nothing.
The same content is missing from ChatGPT mobile, desktop and web. Some files remain visible in previews but return “Forbidden” when I try to open them.
I also have timestamped browser history showing that I repeatedly opened and worked inside this exact Project conversation across the days before the data disappeared. It was active—not abandoned, archived or deleted.
Because the conversation was inside a Project, I have not only lost old messages. I have lost the context that made the entire Project useful.
The Project can no longer access months of its own history. It does not know what we decided, what we rejected or why certain choices were made. Its answers have become vague, generic and irrelevant.
This is the only conversation I know for certain has been affected.
But how would I know if anything else disappeared?
There was no warning, no record of what changed and no version history to compare. I noticed this conversation because it was crucial and I remembered enough of the missing work to realise something was wrong.
If smaller parts of other conversations disappeared, I may never know. You cannot search for something you no longer remember exists.
I contacted OpenAI Support. It directed me to request a data export, which may take up to seven days.
So now I have to wait up to a week just to find out whether the missing data still exists. And an export is not recovery—it only shows what data currently remains associated with my account.
I am not claiming without an investigation that the upgrade caused the loss. I am stating the timeline: I upgraded to Pro 5x through the mobile app, noticed the missing data across that transition, and the affected content is now unavailable across every platform.
@OpenAI , preserve my account data and logs, investigate the complete history of this Project conversation, recover the missing messages and files, determine whether anything else was affected, and explain what happened.
I am not asking for credits or another generic troubleshooting response.
I need a real technical answer:
Does my missing data still exist, and can it be restored?
@sama@fidjissimo , please help get this in front of the team responsible for ChatGPT Projects and data recovery.
Has anyone else noticed missing answers, shortened conversations, inaccessible files or Projects suddenly giving vague responses?
Please check your oldest and longest ChatGPT conversations.
The most dangerous part of silent data loss is that users may never realise it happened.
I trusted ChatGPT with months of work. I deleted nothing.
The Project still exists—but almost 90% of its working memory is gone.
@OpenAI, recover my data.
GPT-5.6 looks impressive on paper.
But after trying it, I still don’t think ChatGPT can compete with fable 5 at the execution level.
Better reasoning is useful.
Actually carrying the work through is what matters.
And Claude still feels ahead there.
Fable 5 just moved from subscription to pay-per-usage and demand isn't flinching.
We've crossed from tools people use to tools people depend on.
Raise rates slowly from here — slow enough that nobody leaves, because nobody *can* leave.
It took billions of years to create humans.
Humans took thousands of years to transform the world.
The last 100 years changed more than the previous 10,000.
AI may compress the next 100 years into 10.
Noticing this more and more 👇
Instagram users default to ChatGPT
X users default to Claude
Same underlying tech. Completely different feel.
ChatGPT fits people who want clean, structured answers.
Claude fits people who are comfortable thinking through messy, evolving ideas.
Different tools — different minds.
You think Iran is decimated because your media tells you that. You are caught in narratives.
The reality is that Iran has rejected ceasefire proposals
The US started the war believing it could eliminate Iran alone. Winning would have given it control over oil routes, but that miscalculation is now forcing it to seek help from allies.