Deleting a ChatGPT conversation removes it from view immediately and from OpenAI's systems within roughly 30 days. Docognito is a separate tool for keeping a chat off the visible screen in the moment, before you ever get to deleting it. Use Data Controls in Settings to delete one chat, several at once, or everything.
Archiving and deleting are not the same action
ChatGPT gives you two ways to get a conversation out of your immediate view, and they behave very differently underneath. Archiving hides a chat from your regular sidebar but keeps it fully intact, and you can restore it from the archived list at any point. Nothing about the content changes, and nothing is queued for removal.
Deleting is a stronger action. The chat leaves your account view straight away and is marked for permanent removal from OpenAI's backend systems. Confusing the two matters most when the reason you want a chat gone is that you no longer want it to exist anywhere, since archiving alone does not achieve that.
Deleting a single conversation
The everyday path is the sidebar itself. Hovering over a chat title exposes a menu with rename, share, archive and delete options, and choosing delete asks for confirmation before removing it. This removes that one conversation from your visible history immediately, and it is the option most people reach for when only one or two chats need to go, rather than the whole account history at once.
The confirmation step is worth pausing on rather than clicking through automatically. Once you confirm, that specific chat has no restore option the way an archived chat does, so a chat you delete by mistake cannot be brought back the way an accidentally archived one can.
Restoring a chat from the archive
Because archiving keeps a conversation intact, undoing it is straightforward. The archived list sits under its own view in the sidebar, and moving a chat back from there returns it to your regular list exactly as it was, with nothing lost in either direction. This is the practical reason to reach for archive rather than delete when you are not fully sure you want a conversation gone for good: it gives you a way back that deletion does not.
Deleting everything through Data Controls
For a full reset rather than one chat at a time, ChatGPT provides a dedicated bulk control.
Open Settings, then Data Controls
This panel is where OpenAI groups every setting related to what is stored about your account, separate from the day to day chat interface.
Choose Delete all chats
This removes every conversation in your account view at once, rather than requiring you to delete conversations individually, and asks for a confirmation step before it runs.
Expect the same 30 day backend window
the conversation itself, which OpenAI and Anthropic still receive and store, so a bulk delete follows the same retention timeline as a single delete: gone from your account immediately, purged from OpenAI's systems within about 30 days.
What the 30 day window actually means
A conversation disappearing from your sidebar the moment you press delete does not mean the data is gone from every system that ever touched it. OpenAI's stated retention window for deleted chat content is roughly 30 days, during which the data may still exist in backend storage even though you can no longer see or reach it through the interface. After that window, the data is expected to be purged.
This is a common source of confusion, since the immediate disappearance from your screen reads as final. It is final from your side, in that you cannot recover a deleted chat, but it is not instantaneous from OpenAI's side.
Deletion and the training opt-out are separate settings
Whether a conversation was used to improve OpenAI's models is governed by a different toggle in Data Controls, not by whether the chat was later deleted. If keeping conversations out of training matters to you, check that setting directly rather than assuming deletion covers it.
Why the screen matters before the archive does
Deletion and archiving both happen after a conversation already exists. Neither one changes what was visible on your screen while you were writing it, which is a separate moment with a separate risk: whoever was near your desk, or glancing over during the conversation itself, already saw whatever was on the page at the time.
the visible page, redrawn as a document editor, the the browser tab title and the the tab icon are what Docognito redraws while a tab stays open, so that the in-the-moment view reads as an ordinary document rather than a chat interface. That is a different job from anything in Data Controls, and it happens before deletion ever becomes a question.
Erasing a conversation versus hiding it while it is open
Removing a conversation from your account for good means using Data Controls: delete it individually for a single chat, or use Delete all for a full reset, and expect the backend copy to clear within about 30 days. If your goal is keeping the conversation from looking like ChatGPT while it is still open in front of you, that is a different problem, and it is the one Docognito was built to solve.