How to download Qwen Chat (chat.qwen.ai) conversations
Qwen Chat is Alibaba's consumer chat product. TotalRecalls reads from your browser session — the DashScope developer API is a different product and is not used.
What "download" usually means
People searching for this want one of three outcomes:
- Backup — don't lose threads if the account changes
- Multilingual archive — Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean threads stay UTF-8 readable
- Searchable library — find an old answer without scrolling forever
Option A — Manual copy/paste from chat.qwen.ai
Qwen Chat does not provide a built-in data download for chat history. The only manual path is to open each conversation, select the text, and paste it into a local file.
- Pros: no tooling, no install
- Cons: loses formatting, doesn't scale past a few threads, easy to lose the order of long threads
Option B — Local library with TotalRecalls (Windows)
TotalRecalls runs on your PC, connects to your Qwen Chat session locally, and writes conversations into folders as Markdown + JSON.
- Buy / install TotalRecalls for Windows
- Choose Qwen Chat as the provider
- Sign in through the local login window at chat.qwen.ai
- Download — files land under
Library/qwen/
Why two Qwen products matter
Alibaba ships Qwen two ways:
- Qwen Chat (chat.qwen.ai) — the consumer chat product. This is what users want to back up.
- DashScope / Bailian / Model Studio (dashscope.aliyuncs.com) — Alibaba's developer API for the Qwen model family. Has its own ToS rules.
TotalRecalls only touches the consumer chat product. We never call DashScope endpoints, never use Alibaba API keys, and never touch your developer-account credentials. The download path is the same path a backup tool would use for webmail — read the visible content from your own browser session.
Which should you use?
Use manual copy/paste for one or two threads you need right now. Use TotalRecalls when you want a complete, searchable archive — especially if you also use ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Grok and want one archive location for all of them.
Tips for a clean Qwen Chat archive
- Run the download while you still have an active session — Qwen Chat sessions expire on inactivity
- Keep the folder inside a backup drive or cloud backup you control
- Prefer Markdown for reading; keep JSON if you might process later
- UTF-8 throughout — Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean all stay readable in any editor
About the international vs domestic domain
Qwen Chat is served from chat.qwen.ai (international) and from qianwen.com / tongyi.aliyun.com (domestic). TotalRecalls targets the international web app. If you're on the domestic app, sign in via the international one to download.