PSA: ChatGPT conversations can vanish overnight and OpenAI support won't recover them

This happened to two people I know personally in the last month. One was a coworker. Logged into ChatGPT on a Monday morning and his entire sidebar was empty. 8 months of conversations gone. Client research, prompt templates he'd been refining for weeks, code snippets he referenced constantly. All of it. He contacted OpenAI. Got a generic "we're looking into it" response. It's been weeks now. Nothing came back. The second was someone from my Reddit community who posted about the same thing. Logged in, conversations just gone. Partial recovery a few days later but not everything.