What's actually in your Instagram data export?

Follower lists are the part people come for. They are a small fraction of what Instagram hands over.

Updated 25 September 2026

When you request your data, Instagram builds a zip file containing everything it holds about your account in structured form. Most people open it, see dozens of folders full of JSON files, and close it again.

Here is what is actually in there, and which parts are worth your attention.

The follower data

This lives in connections/followers_and_following/:

Each entry holds a username and a timestamp of when the connection was made. Comparing the first two files is what tells you who doesn't follow you back — there is no single file that answers that directly.

The parts most people miss

Four other sections tell you things the app itself never shows.

Login history

Under security_and_login_information/, Instagram records every login to your account with a timestamp and IP address. This is the single most useful part of the export for security: a login from a place or time you don't recognise is worth investigating, and it is information the app gives you no easy view of.

Devices

A list of every device that has accessed your account, including ones you may have forgotten — an old phone, a tablet you sold, a computer at a previous job. Anything unfamiliar here deserves the same attention as an unfamiliar login.

Search history

Your recent searches, split between account searches and word or phrase searches. People are often surprised how far back this goes and how clearly it reflects what they were interested in at a given time.

Likes and comments

Every post you have liked and every comment you have left. Aggregated, this reveals which accounts you engage with most — which is frequently not the accounts you would have guessed.

The bulk of the file

If your export is large, it is because of media. Photos, videos, stories and message attachments are all included at full quality, and they dwarf everything else. The text records — including every file discussed above — are usually a rounding error by comparison.

This is why limiting the export to Followers and following is worth doing if you only want the follower lists. The file arrives in minutes instead of hours and is small enough to work with comfortably on a phone.

What is not in the export

Worth knowing, because plenty of tools claim otherwise:

• Who viewed your profile. Instagram doesn't record this for you, and nothing in the export contains it. Any app promising profile views is making it up.
• Who unfollowed you. There is no unfollow log. You can only work this out by comparing two exports taken at different times — see the guide on that.
• Other people's data. You get usernames of people you are connected to, nothing more. No email addresses, no phone numbers, no private information about anyone else.
• Most deleted content. The export reflects the account as it stands now.

A note on what you do with it

Taken together, this file is a detailed record of your account: who you know, what you searched for, where you logged in from and on what device. That is exactly why it is worth being careful about where it goes.

Uploading it to a service that stores it hands over all of that. Tools that read it in your browser never receive it. The distinction matters more with this file than almost any other you own — more on how to tell them apart.