Can I still download my Sora videos after the shutdown?

Yes: as of 8 October 2026, OpenAI still offers the export

If you made videos in Sora and never downloaded them, they aren’t necessarily gone. When we read OpenAI’s Sora sunset page on 8 October 2026, it said, in full: “Sora is no longer available. You can export your data at any time.” Under it is an Export button.

That matters because a lot of what you’ll find on this question says otherwise. Pages written in March told people to export “before the end of March”, and some say the videos were deleted when the app closed. OpenAI’s own help page on the discontinuation, last updated in September 2026, still answers “Will I be able to export my data after the Sora app is discontinued?” with a plain yes.

The catch is that this won’t last. The same help page says that after Sora is discontinued, and after any final export window passes, OpenAI “will permanently delete any data associated with your use of Sora”. It doesn’t give a date for that. It does say that if it offers a final export window, it will email you before it begins, and it recommends exporting “as soon as possible”. So if you have anything in Sora you care about, today is the day.

How to export everything you made in Sora

OpenAI’s help page gives the steps in one line: go to sora.chatgpt.com/sunset, click Export, and you’ll get an email when it’s ready. In practice:

1. Sign in with the account you used for Sora. The export is tied to the account, so if you used more than one (a personal and a work login, say), do this once for each.
2. **Open sora.chatgpt.com/sunset and click Export.**3. Wait for OpenAI’s email. OpenAI doesn’t say how long it takes, and a big library will take longer than a small one. Check your spam folder if nothing arrives.
3. Download it straight away, to a computer rather than a phone. You want the files somewhere you can see them, check them and copy them.
4. Open a few of the videos before you relax. Play one from the start, one from the middle of your history and the most recent. A download that stopped halfway can look fine until you play it.

If you used the Sora API rather than the app, the picture is different. OpenAI’s deprecations page says the Videos API and the sora-2 and sora-2-pro models shut down on 24 September 2026, with no replacement named. OpenAI’s help page doesn’t say whether the export covers videos made through the API, so the copies that count are the ones your own code saved when it made them.

What happened to Sora, by OpenAI’s own dates

The dates are worth having straight, because write-ups disagree. These are from OpenAI’s own pages, read on 8 October 2026:

OpenAI’s help page also mentions refunds and credits in its summary, but the answers we could read on 8 October 2026 only cover dates, exports and deletion. If you had paid credits left, contact OpenAI’s support from the help centre rather than relying on anyone else’s account of the policy.

Once it arrives: keep the originals, and keep two copies

An export is a rescue, not storage. A few habits make sure you only have to do it once.

Keep the files exactly as they arrive. OpenAI’s provenance page says its videos carry Content Credentials, the open C2PA standard that records which tool made a file and when. The same page says everyday actions such as taking a screenshot or converting a file can strip them. So keep the untouched originals in one folder, and do any trimming, re-encoding or renaming on copies.

Put the originals in two places. One on your computer or an external drive, one somewhere separate: a cloud drive, or a second drive kept elsewhere. If one copy goes, the other is still there.

Write down what you’ll forget. A video file on its own doesn’t tell you what it was for or how you got it. If a clip matters, note beside it what it was for and roughly how you made it, while you still remember.

Make the folder findable. Nobody finds “video_0412.mp4” a year later. A folder per project, with the date at the front of the name, is enough for most people.

The lesson for every platform you make things on

Sora’s closure caught people out because the app was where their videos lived. Every platform’s history works the same way: it’s a convenient list of what you made there, and it lasts as long as the platform, your plan and your account do. That’s no criticism of any one tool: it’s simply what a history is.

A routine that holds up wherever you work:

• Download what you keep, when you make it. Not at the end of the project, and not when a shutdown email arrives.
• Keep one library across tools, rather than one per platform. Your Sora clips, your Kling tests and your Nano Banana stills belong to the same projects, so they belong in the same place.
• Keep your references with your work. If you built a character in Sora, the pictures that defined it are what let you carry it into another model. Our guide to keeping a character consistent covers how to do that with references any model can use.

This is the problem we built BosOn for. It’s a desktop app that keeps everything you make with AI in one library: you can drop in the files from your Sora export alongside everything else, and it files what you keep from its Create screen named, dated and marked with the model that made it. It’s in early access, and the platforms it works with today are on our integrations page.

If you’re moving your video work somewhere new, our explainers on Seedance 2.5 and Kling 4.0 set out what each can do and where you can run it, as of October 2026.