Unarchiving issue. Troubleshooting failed
OpenAI Developer Community
June 24, 2026
I’m trying to determine whether anyone else has seen a similar issue with older, very long archived ChatGPT conversations.
I have a number of archived conversations that had previously reached the conversation limit. Around February/March 2026, many of them became partially inaccessible.
The behavior differs by client. On Web/Android, affected conversations show "The conversation is too long, please start a new one.”
On iOS, some of the same conversations can still appear through Search and may open there, but unarchiving fails every single time.
The affected conversations still appear in my data export, so they do not appear to be fully deleted. The issue looks more like an inconsistent conversation/archive state, metadata, or loading problem affecting older long conversations.
My goal is not to continue these conversations. I’m just trying to access the existing history so I can copy/save needed information and then clean up/delete the archived chats.
The export only helps partially, because it does not fully replace the in-product conversation view, especially where edited/regenerated paths inside the same conversation matter.
Has anyone else run into older long archived conversations becoming inaccessible or impossible to unarchive like this? If so, were you able to recover access, or was export the only usable workaround?
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