Ultra Power / Guides / Archived chats

How to find and unarchive archived ChatGPT chats

They are in Settings, then Data controls, then Archived chats, behind a button marked Manage. That opens a list of every chat you have archived, with an unarchive control on each row that puts it straight back in your sidebar, whole. Checked on 9 September 2026 in the current ChatGPT interface.

The exact path

1. 1
   Open your profile menu

   The avatar at the bottom of the sidebar on the web, or the same avatar in the app.

2. 2
   Settings, then Data controls

   Not General. Data controls is where everything about your history is kept: shared links, archived chats, archive all, delete all and the data export.

3. 3
   Archived chats, then Manage

   A window opens with a row per archived chat, showing its name and the date it was created.

4. 4
   Unarchive the one you want

   Each row has two controls: unarchive, which returns the chat to your sidebar with its full history, and delete, which is permanent.

What that list will not do for you

Three things, and they are worth knowing before you go looking for a chat you archived last March:

• No search. The list shows names and creation dates and nothing else. With a few hundred archived chats you are scrolling and reading.
• No multi-select. Unarchiving is one row, one click, one at a time. There is no select all and no way to bring a batch back at once.
• No preview. You are picking by title, so a chat auto-named "New chat" is a guess until you unarchive it and look.

Ultra Power does not fix that list, and I would rather say so than imply otherwise: an archived chat is out of the sidebar, so there is no row for the extension to put a checkbox on. What it does cover is the direction that actually loses things, which is archiving and deleting in the first place.

Archiving in bulk, and taking it back

ChatGPT archives one chat at a time from the menu on each row in the sidebar, plus a single Archive all chats button in Data controls that takes everything and asks no questions. There is nothing in between, which is the gap.

1. 1
   Tick the chats you want out of the way

   Checkboxes on every row, shift-click for a range, or Select all across your whole history rather than the part the sidebar has drawn.

2. 2
   Archive

   One action for the whole set. It runs in the background, so you can keep using ChatGPT while it works.

3. 3
   Undo, if that was too much

   The toolbar keeps an Undo for the batch you just ran, and it survives a page reload. Undoing an archive unarchives exactly the chats that batch touched.

Archived, deleted, trashed

Archiving is the reversible verb, which makes it the right one whenever you are tidying rather than clearing something out for privacy. If you are archiving to hide a conversation from someone who uses your account, remember an archived chat is still in the account and still one click from being read.

On the phone

Same account, same archive. The iOS and Android apps reach it through the same settings screens, and a chat you archive on your phone is archived on the web a second later. Nothing here is device-specific, which also means nothing on your phone can bring back what the web deleted.