What the button does
Settings has a button for a data access request. Press it and kontiqo collects everything belonging to your account, packs it into an archive and sends you a link by email.
"Everything" really means everything: your ideas with all their intermediate versions, the published posts, your settings, your style profile, the analytics for your posts, the comments under them (for older ones without the name and without the wording, because we remove the name after 24 hours and the text after 48) - and every image still in your library, including the AI marker inside the file.
Images belonging to posts published more than ninety days ago are removed from our storage; the platform hosts them from then on, and your archive carries the entry without the file.
Why the images are the point
This is the difference you only notice when you need it.
A data export consisting of a JSON file meets the letter of the law. You get a list of filenames and addresses - and when you close the account, those addresses point nowhere. Your images are gone.
kontiqo puts the files themselves into the archive. In the verification run against a real library that was 175 images and 156 megabytes. What you get is not information about your data, but your data.
Why it takes a few minutes
The archive is built in the background. On a well-used account that means hundreds of files to collect and compress - no web page stays open through that.
So you press the button, do something else, and get the email with the link once it is ready.
What it is good for beyond the law
Switching. If kontiqo stops being the right fit, you take your library with you. That is an inconvenient thing we deliberately made convenient.
As a backup. An archive on your own drive is still there when something goes wrong somewhere else.
For looking back. What did I write a year ago, and what came of it? In the archive both sit side by side.