How to export a whole Claude project — instructions, knowledge files, and every chat
Single conversations are easy to think about — one chat, one file. A project is a different kind of thing, and it's the part of Claude people are most afraid of losing. By the time a project matters, it's carrying carefully tuned custom instructions, a dozen or more knowledge-base documents you uploaded, and dozens of conversations that build on each other. It is, in every practical sense, a small body of work.
And there is no way to get it out as a unit. No "Export project" button. Claude's official Settings → Privacy → Export hands you one account-wide conversations.json with no per-project scope, no readable format, and attachments as references rather than files — and it reconstructs neither your instructions nor your knowledge base. Exporting the chats one at a time, even with a good single-chat exporter, still leaves the two things that made it a project behind: the instructions and the knowledge base.
What a project actually contains
To archive a project properly you have to capture all of it, not just the transcripts:
- Custom instructions — the system prompt that shapes every conversation in the project.
- The knowledge base — the documents you uploaded for the project to draw on, both text and binary files.
- Every conversation — in order, with artifacts, tool calls, and generated files intact.
- Attachments — files uploaded into individual chats and documents Claude generated, as real bytes.
Miss any one of these and you have a pile of transcripts, not a project you could actually pick back up or hand to someone else.
What project export produces
On any claude.ai/project/<id> page, Project Export bundles all of the above into one ZIP, laid out so a human can navigate it — not a raw graph dump:
<Project Name>/
README.md ← what's here, and what Claude doesn't expose
instructions.md ← the project's custom instructions
metadata.json
files/ ← knowledge-base docs + uploaded files
_INDEX.md
conversations/
<date>_<title>/
<title>.<ext>
attachments/ ← only when "Include attachments" is on
_INDEX.md ← every conversation: OK / skipped / failed
The top-level _INDEX.md is the part that makes it trustworthy as an archive: it lists every conversation in the project and whether it exported cleanly, was skipped, or failed — so you know the bundle is complete, rather than hoping it is.
Why nothing else does this
This is the honest core of it. Free, one-click "export this chat" tools operate at the level of a single conversation — that's the whole market, and for a lot of people it's enough. Bundling an entire project — walking the instructions, pulling every knowledge-base document down as a file, paginating through every conversation, and packaging attachments in their original bytes — is a different job, and it's the one thing the commodity exporters don't do. It's why project export sits on the paid tier: it does real work on your behalf, and it's the differentiator worth paying for if you have projects worth keeping. Here's how it compares to other exporters.
The reframe from our other posts applies doubly here: this isn't exporting, it's archiving. A project export is a self-contained, human-readable snapshot of a body of work — one you own, that keeps existing no matter what happens to the account or the platform.
When you'd actually use it
- Handing a project off — give a colleague the instructions, knowledge base, and history as one folder.
- Archiving a finished project — freeze the whole thing before you move on or clean up your workspace.
- Backing up before a change — a plan downgrade, an account switch, or just peace of mind.
- Moving into a PKM tool — drop the Markdown bundle straight into Obsidian or Notion, knowledge base and all.
How to export a project
- Open the project at
claude.ai/project/…and install AI Chat Archive. - Click the Export button (top-right) and choose Project Export.
- Pick a format — Markdown is the usual choice for archiving and PKM — optionally toggle Include attachments, and export. The ZIP builds in your browser and lands in your Downloads.
Project export covers Markdown, HTML, JSON and TXT (PDF is single-chat only). Full walkthrough in the docs: how to export a Claude project. For single conversations, see how to export and save your Claude chats; if your old export method recently broke, here's why and what still works.
When you don't need this
If you only ever want the occasional single conversation, you don't need project export at all — single-chat export is free, in every format. Project export is for when the thing you'd hate to lose isn't one chat, it's the whole project: the instructions, the knowledge base, and everything built on top of them.