Apple gives you a complete export of everything in Health, which is genuinely good and admirably thorough. It is also buried in an odd place, slow, and delivered in a format almost nothing reads without help.
The steps
- 1
Open Health and tap your profile picture
Top right corner of the Summary tab. This is the account screen, not Settings on the iPhone, which is where most people look first.
- 2
Scroll all the way to the bottom
Past your details, past the privacy sections, past everything. The export option sits at the very end of the screen and is easy to miss on a first pass.
- 3
Tap Export All Health Data and confirm
There is no way to export a subset. It is everything, all at once, all the way back to your first recorded sample.
- 4
Wait, with the app open
The phone assembles the archive in the foreground. Leave the Health app open and the screen unlocked. Ten to thirty minutes is normal on a long history, occasionally longer. Plugging in helps, since this is a genuinely heavy operation.
- 5
Choose where to save it from the share sheet
Save to Files, iCloud Drive or send it to a computer. Do not email it to yourself and consider the job done, since these archives are frequently too large to send.
What is actually in the file
export.xml. The main event. Every sample ever recorded: heart rate, steps, sleep, HRV, workouts, weight, everything any app has ever written. On a multi-year history this file is frequently hundreds of megabytes.
export_cda.xml. Clinical Document Architecture format, containing health records if you have connected any providers.
workout-routes. A folder of GPX files, one per outdoor workout with GPS. Directly usable in mapping tools, and often the most immediately interesting part.
Making it readable
The XML is the problem. It is valid, complete and enormous, and most text editors will struggle or refuse.
The practical options are a converter that turns export.xml into CSV per data type, a spreadsheet after that conversion, or a script if you are comfortable writing one. Python with a streaming XML parser handles it well, because loading the whole document into memory is exactly what causes most naive attempts to fail.
Be sensible about what you feed to third-party converters. This file contains your complete health history, and an online converter is a stranger’s server.
Reasons this is worth doing
Switching phones away from iOS. Health data does not follow you to Android, and this is the only complete copy you will get.
Your own analysis. The raw samples support questions no app will answer for you.
Insurance against an app going away. Anything written into Health is in here, including data from apps that later shut down.
Because it is free and it takes one wait. Health history is the sort of thing you only regret not having.
Coming from another platform, the equivalents are how to export your WHOOP data and, for Oura, the CSV export in the Membership Hub covered in how to cancel your Oura membership.