Can it handle a huge Snapchat export, like 100GB?

• 100GB, Windows PC, Chrome: 50 ZIPs of 2GB, 87,500 memories from 2016 to 2026 across 12 time zones. 1 hour 40 minutes at a steady pace, no slowdown as the folder filled. 87,500 of 87,500 dates, every location that had one, and 24,609 of 24,609 captions, including 2,734 drawn into videos.
• 60GB, Mac, Chrome: 30 ZIPs, 52,500 memories. About an hour, with the same result.
• Real exports: the biggest real one run through it so far is about 12GB. The test exports above are built to match Snapchat's format exactly, but they are tests, and it's fair to say so.
• Real exports have fewer, bigger files: a real 12.6GB export held 3,630 memories, about 290 per GB, so 80GB is more like 23,000 than 70,000. Time goes by the number of files more than the gigabytes.

The usual worry is that a browser tab loads the whole export into memory and falls over. This doesn't. It opens one ZIP at a time, holds about one photo at any moment, and hands each finished file straight to your disk. So a 100GB export needs the same memory as a 1GB one. What it does need is room on the disk.

• Chrome or Edge on a laptop or desktop, ideally. They save straight into a folder you pick, carry on if a run stops, and handle a full disk. Safari and Firefox do exactly the same fixes, but hand you one ZIP at the end instead, which always needs about three times your export's size in free space for a moment, and a run that stops starts over. On a small export nobody notices. On a 100GB one, that's 300GB free and hours you don't want to redo.
• Free space the size of your export, once more. Your ZIPs and the fixed photos exist side by side for a while. Short on room? Pick a folder on an external drive, or delete finished ZIPs as it goes: when the disk fills, it says which one is safe to delete, then carries on.
• Every ZIP, dropped in at once. Snapchat splits a big export into ZIPs of about 2GB, so 100GB is about 50 of them. Only one holds the dates, and they're read together. More on split exports.
• The tab in front and the machine awake. A tab in the background can get put to sleep. Plug in a laptop and turn off sleep until it's done.

Nothing is lost. Drop the same ZIPs in, pick the same folder, and it skips everything already finished. After the first run the dates are kept in your folder, so it can carry on even if you've already deleted the ZIP they came in.

A phone runs it too, the same way Safari does: one ZIP at the end, so it needs room for about three times your export, and it pauses when the screen locks. That makes it great for the free 500 files or a small export. For a library this size, a laptop or desktop is the better tool.