2026-09-26 22:34:13 +03:00

Chatgpt has a data synchronisation bug that can easily cause data loss

Just thought that I should let you know, share what to keep in mind, and how to avoid losing your data. If you use 
Chatgpt from multiple devices, like your phone and your laptop, you should be mindful of this.

So, let's say you are a poor student burning your little money on a Pro 20X, you might still find yourself having to 
use the Chatgpt side of things when your window goes empty. This is superfluous, just setting the mood, it just matters 
that you use from multiple clients as far as I know. This all is also very recent, happened the day before yesterday, 
on 24.9.2026 at a bit before 5 in the morning Finnish time.

I was working on a multi-day conversation from my laptop, my phone and desktop, using the Android app, the desktop 
Linux app and the web version. All was going pretty good. Slow responses, yes, but the app finally not always reporting 
internal server error or whatever the red error message says when sending follow ups on a conversation (could you 
please fix this openai?), overall was nice getting stuff done even if I had to work on a shittier interface.

Then I noticed that on my phone, the conversation didn't advance, it was stuck in the past.

Now, I guess it's my intuition, years of experience and my subconscious mind being paranoid, but I semi-consciously 
went like "hmm, strange, let's not message through my phone on this chat", and continued working on just the desktop 
app and the web chat for that chat.

While doing this, my phone still kept receiving notifications on finished responses from the problematic chat in 
guestion, but opening them only showed the stuck past. Opening the conversation fresh on web ui had the latest 
responses and content. The android app continued to work just fine on other conversations, and I used it for them. Just 
the single conversation did not update when opened. Was getting stuff done, so did not worry about it too much.

Well, at some point I'm like okay, lets see if I can figure this out. I force stopped the app and cleared cache. Didn't 
uninstall and reinstall, was lazy I know. I did this many times, and still the conversation was stuck, which was very 
strange to me, because opening a fresh web chat had the newest content.

How could the android application not refresh when cache is cleared but the web chat show it when opened fresh? I don't 
know, I bet I could sic codex on it and it would figure it out but I rather burn my window on more useful stuff, like 
my millions of projects that I would finally like to release as foss with the help of codex...

Anycase, fine, time to take a break from development, so I left the conversation open on my laptop in a browser in a 
non active tab, and the desktop app open, and went to chill a bit and watch some series. I don't remember if the 
conversation itself was open on the desktop app, I think it was but can't be sure.

After watching a few episodes of some brainrot anime and while on the sofa I have a real genius of an idea, a real 
stroke of a mastermind, the masterplan of the ages, and figure, "Hey, what's the worst that could happen? Surely this 
is so battle tested and deployed by a competent company that there's no way anything bad could happen. Sending a 
message to the affected chat on my phone must only force synchronisation and bring the affected conversation on my 
phone back to the latest content from the past, right? No need to first back up the conversation, surely this is safe.".

Well, you can probably guess.

What happened instead was that ALL other conversations are pulled back to the past. It was surreal seeing on the 
desktop linux app when opening the conversation, seeing the cached data, and then it just scrolling and then 
disappearing ":D".

I lost three days worth of conversation because of this. Fortunately I had downloaded one of the artifacts so I didn't 
lose full progress, but damn, this sucks.

I have reported this to OpenAI, but dunno if they take it seriously, it didn't really seem so based on their response. 
The data is also missing from data exports ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I hope they address this.

TL;DR:

Conversations can get out of sync on different clients, and force stopping and clearing cache does not fix this.

A fix? Don't have one. But if you want to avoid data loss, don't send messages to chats that are in the past from 
affected devices. And back up your data regularly.

Also, run codex in a vm, preferably also on a separate machine. Has saved my ass previously many times already.

Best of luck