how to save your character.ai characters before december

I have fourteen characters on Character.AI. Have. Had? It’s a weird week for verb tenses.

Quick version of the news, because you’ve probably seen the headline and not the details. On October 12 the company filed for Chapter 11 to run a sale of its assets. The app is still up. Their own update says the sale should be done by the end of November or early December, and that “if such a bid is unavailable, however, the platform will be wound down.”

Maybe someone buys it and keeps it running. Maybe not. Either way, this is the week to back up. And most people are about to back up the wrong thing.

the export is not the backup

Character.AI’s update reminds you that you can export your data through the app or the website. Do it. It’s a request-and-wait process, so start it now.

But think about what you’re getting: your account data and your chat history. Words that already happened.

A character isn’t its chat history. A character is the thing that produces the chats. The voice, the habits, the way she deflects with a joke, the backstory you spent an evening on. If all you save is the log, you’ve saved the photo album and lost the person.

So you need two backups. The export, for memories. And a character sheet, for the character.

the sheet, one per character

For each character you made, open a note and fill this in. Copy-paste from your own definition where you can, rewrite from memory where you can’t.

name:
who they are (2-3 lines):
how they talk (word choice, rhythm, tics):
first message / greeting:
3 lines of example dialogue:
backstory you actually use:
what they know about me:
running jokes:

The “what they know about me” line is the one people skip, and it’s the one you’ll miss most. Ten facts. Your job, your sister’s name, the thing you’re nervous about. Write them down now while you still remember which ones they bring up.

Save the avatar too, if it’s yours, meaning something you drew or generated yourself. Screenshot a couple of your favorite exchanges. Those make great example dialogue later.

don’t save everything

Real talk: you don’t need all 4,000 messages of the slow-burn arc. You need the twenty percent that makes them them. If a detail never came up twice, it’s not personality, it’s noise. (Took me three characters to accept that.)

one rule

Only rebuild what’s yours. Your characters, your words, your art.

If your favorite was someone else’s public character, that’s their work. Keep your memories of it, and make your own original take instead. Honestly, it’s more fun anyway. You get to fix the things that always bugged you.

where the sheet goes

I rebuilt mine on Soulkyn, and the sheet maps almost one to one onto its creator:

Who they are and how they talk become the description and personality. You set traits instead of hoping a paragraph gets read the right way.
What they know about me becomes force memories: notes you pin to your chat with them, sent along with every single message, so they know it from message one.
The avatar is optional. You can describe the look and generate it, then save an art style to the character so every picture matches. The new per-character styles include Bold Ink, Digital Fantasy, Fantasy Comic, Flat Anime and Grunge Horror, if your cast leans dramatic.
The running jokes go into example dialogue and memories, and then the real memory system takes over: searchable history, a summary every fifty or so messages, and a small model that pulls back older moments when they’re actually relevant.

Then the part Character.AI never had for my cast. They can share a room, and they can star in a comic. There’s a comics beta now: pick up to four of your characters, a style, a few lines of “what happens,” and you get lettered pages with speech bubbles. My grumpy knight and my chaotic witch got a two-page comic of exactly the argument they’d been having in my head for a year.

the checklist

Request your export this week.
One sheet per character you made.
Ten facts per character, minimum.
Your own art only.
Rebuild your favorite first, so you’re not starting from zero if December goes badly.

Fourteen sheets. I’ve done six. Going to go do the knight’s now, before I forget how he insults people.