How to Save Your HereAfter AI Recordings Before the Service Closes
To save your HereAfter AI recordings, email support@hereafter.ai from your account address and request a complete export: every raw audio answer, all photos, transcripts if they exist, and the question list with recording dates. Ask for original-quality files, verify each one plays, then store copies in at least two separate places.
Somewhere on a server whose bills will soon stop being paid sits a recording of your mother describing her first apartment, or your father explaining how he proposed. This guide gets those files into your hands: the email to send, the files to demand, and the way to store them so no company's fate can touch them again. One honest note first. Afterlife.ai® is a competitor of HereAfter AI, and you should weigh everything here knowing that. The rescue below is complete on its own, asks nothing of you, and works whether or not you ever read another page on this site.
What is happening to HereAfter AI?
HereAfter AI is winding down. As of July 2026 the company's FAQ and help pages no longer resolve, which means its users' single most practical question, how do I get my recordings out, has no official public answer. That is the gap this page fills. The story of the shutdown itself, what was announced and what the wider shakeout means for the category, is covered separately in HereAfter AI is shutting down. This page is only the rescue.
It is worth saying plainly that HereAfter was a serious product. Co-founded in 2019 by journalist James Vlahos, after his 2017 WIRED essay about building a conversational biography of his father, the app understood something most memory tools never have: people do not want to write their life story, they want to be asked for it. If you spent hours answering those interview questions, you were not backing the wrong app. You were doing the real work. The recorded answers, in your family's actual voices, are the asset. The company was only ever the container.
Your memories should never have a landlord.
How do I request my HereAfter AI export?
Email is the whole mechanism. With the help pages gone, there is no public self-serve export button as of July 2026, so your request goes to a person, and the quality of your email decides the speed and completeness of your export.
Send the request from the email address on the HereAfter account. Support can only verify the account holder, and a mismatched address adds a week of back-and-forth.
If the account belongs to another family member, send the email together from their address. Ten minutes, one coffee, done.
Write to support@hereafter.ai with a subject line that states exactly what you want, so a shrinking team can triage your request at a glance.
Itemize everything you are asking for. The template below covers all of it.
Allow five to ten business days for a reply. Wind-downs run on skeleton crews, and every export may be assembled by hand.
If you hear nothing, reply weekly on the same thread. A fresh email starts you at the back of the queue; a reply keeps your history attached.
Here is a template you can copy, adjust, and send today.
Subject: Data export request, full account archive for [your account email]
Hello. I am a HereAfter AI account holder, and I would like a complete export of my data before the service closes. Specifically: (1) all raw audio recordings from my account, in their original quality and format; (2) all photos I uploaded; (3) transcripts, if any exist; (4) the interview questions or chapter titles with recording dates, so I can keep everything in order; and (5) a note on the file format and an estimated timeline. If a self-serve export exists, a link is all I need. Thank you for building something my family cared about, and for taking care of this last chapter.
That closing sentence is not decoration. Someone at the other end is shutting down years of their own work, one export at a time, and kindness moves queues.
What exactly should I ask for, and why?
The raw audio files, in their original quality and format. Not a screen capture, not a stitched-together highlight reel. The originals are the master copies; everything else is a photocopy.
Every answer, not just every chapter. The individual recorded answers are the atoms of the archive. Ask for all of them, including anything unfinished, unpublished, or re-recorded.
Your photos. Chapters could carry images, and most families forget which ones they added.
Transcripts, if they exist. Text is searchable in a way audio never is, and a transcript turns three hours of listening into a ten-minute scan.
The question list and recording dates. The questions are the context: "tell me about your first job" turns an unlabeled three-minute clip into a titled chapter of a life.
Deletion confirmation, requested only after your files have arrived and been verified. You want the copy, and then you want to be the only one holding a copy.
How should I save the audio files once they arrive?
Download everything the day the link arrives. Export links are usually temporary, wind-down infrastructure is not being lovingly maintained, and a link that works this week may quietly stop working next month.
Before filing anything away, play every file, or at least spot-check the beginning, middle, and end of each. A corrupted download discovered today costs one follow-up email. Discovered in five years, when there is no one left to email, the same corruption costs the recording itself.
Keep the original format. Your files will most likely arrive as M4A or MP3, and both play on every modern phone, computer, and car stereo. Converting between compressed formats only loses quality, so convert copies if you must and never touch the originals.
Name files so a stranger could navigate them. Something like 2026-07_hereafter_mom/04_first-apartment.m4a will still make sense in thirty years. voice-final-2.m4a will not.
Write one plain text file listing each recording, the question that was asked, and the date. Ten minutes of typing that decades of grandchildren will thank you for.
Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two different kinds of storage, one of them somewhere else. Your computer, an external drive in a drawer, and a cloud account is the classic arrangement.
Storage is not the obstacle it sounds like. Uncompressed CD-quality audio runs about 10 MB a minute and M4A closer to one, so even three full hours of interviews fits in roughly 2 GB uncompressed, or a few hundred megabytes as delivered. That fits on the cheapest flash drive at the register. Families rarely lose archives to disk space. They lose them to access: a cloud account nobody else can open is a locked safe, which is why your digital legacy plan should record where the archive lives and who can reach it, and why it helps to know what happens to iCloud accounts when the owner is no longer logging in.
A file nobody can find is a file nobody has.
What if HereAfter support does not reply?
Be persistent before you are formal, and keep the tone warm: whoever reads your email is probably dismantling something they spent years building.
While the app still works, make an insurance copy yourself. Play each chapter and capture the audio with your phone's built-in screen recording. The quality drops a step from the originals and the process is tedious, but an imperfect copy in your hands beats a perfect file you may never receive.
If weeks pass in silence, put your data rights in writing. In the EU and UK, the GDPR grants rights of access and portability over your personal data; California's CCPA grants a similar right of access. One firm sentence is enough: "I am formally requesting access to my personal data, and I would appreciate confirmation within 30 days." You are not threatening anyone. You are moving your email from the pile marked someday to the pile marked deadline.
And compare notes with other users. Public forums and app-store reviews will surface the export route that is actually working faster than any official channel will.
The wind-down, by the numbers
A few dated facts, for the record and for anyone citing this page. All figures are as of July 2026.
HereAfter AI was co-founded in 2019 by journalist James Vlahos, whose 2017 WIRED essay about building a conversational biography of his father helped start the category.
Subscriptions ran between $3.99 and $7.99 per month under the company's final published pricing.
As of July 2026, the FAQ and help pages at hereafter.ai no longer resolve, leaving support email as the only known export channel.
The consolidation is bigger than one company: StoryFile, the video-interview pioneer cited alongside HereAfter for years, filed for Chapter 11 in 2024 before refocusing on enterprise work.
Uncompressed CD-quality audio takes about 10 MB per minute; M4A takes roughly 1 MB per minute. Nearly every family's complete archive fits under a few gigabytes.
The 3-2-1 backup rule has been standard archival practice for roughly two decades, and remains the simplest standard a family can actually keep.
Can these recordings become something living again?
Everything above this line is complete without anything below it. If you came for the rescue, you have the rescue. What follows is the part where I stop being neutral, kept short and clearly marked.
A rescued archive is precious, and still. The files play the same way every time; nobody can ask your mother what the first apartment smelled like, or who lived across the hall. What made HereAfter worth the hours was conversation, and the honest way to have that again is not resurrection from old files. It is a rebuild, with the storyteller, while the storyteller is here to say yes. If the voice in those recordings belongs to someone still adding chapters, the best time to sit down together again is this year, not someday. If it belongs to someone who is gone, then the archive you just saved is exactly what it should be: their words, in their voice, safe with you, beyond any company's roadmap.
The rebuild is what Afterlife AI™ exists for. Guided capture interviews you the way HereAfter did, question by question, and builds your Persona from the answers: a living likeness your family can talk with, not just play back. Release rules leave the Moments you choose for the people you choose, released after your Executor Lock™ activates. Executor Lock freezes your Persona as a perfect snapshot at the point you decide, so nothing about who you are drifts afterward. Voice preservation happens only with your explicit recorded consent, using professional voice technology. The build itself is free: 50 memories, no card, and the free build never expires. Paid plans at $14.99 and $29.99 a month exist when you want to go further, and the plans page spells out exactly what each includes. Your rescued recordings, meanwhile, are the finest prompt list you will ever own: every question HereAfter asked is worth answering again, deeper, on ground you control. If the storyteller in your family is a parent, start with their voice and the stories only they can tell. If the storyteller is you, start with your own life story while the details are still sharp.
One standard, learned at HereAfter's expense, that you should hold every service to, including mine: before you record a word, ask how you get your words out. Ask about exports, formats, and what happens if the company fails. A company that deserves ten years of your family's stories can tell you, calmly and specifically, how you would leave with them.
A company can close. Your family's voice does not have to close with it.
Frequently asked questions
Can I still export my recordings from HereAfter AI?
As of July 2026, yes. Email support@hereafter.ai from the address on your account and request a complete export of your audio, photos, transcripts, and question list. No final deadline has been published, which is a reason to move faster, not slower. Treat the request as this week's errand.
What format will my HereAfter AI recordings be in?
Expect compressed audio, most likely M4A or MP3, which plays on every modern phone, computer, and car stereo. Ask for the original quality and format in your request, keep those originals unconverted, and make any conversions on copies only.
What happens to my recordings if I do nothing?
When a service winds down, servers are eventually decommissioned and the data on them is deleted or becomes unreachable. Nobody can promise that export requests will still be answered a year from now. The only place your recordings certainly survive is storage you control.
Do I have a legal right to my HereAfter AI data?
In many places, yes. The GDPR in the EU and UK grants rights of access and portability over your personal data, and California's CCPA grants a right of access. Most companies honor a polite request without any law being mentioned, so save the formal language for a follow-up if silence stretches past a few weeks.
Can Afterlife AI™ import my HereAfter recordings automatically?
No, and I will not pretend otherwise. No importer turns another company's files into your Persona; a living likeness is built with you, through guided capture, with consent at every step. Your rescued recordings serve as the map of the stories that matter, and the free 50-memory build is enough to find out whether the approach feels right. If you are weighing every option, comparisons like HereAfter AI vs StoryWorth cover the ones that are not us too.