Every Way to Export LinkedIn and Sales Navigator Data (and When Each One Actually Works)

A few months back I was running Sales Navigator searches for a client project — filtering down to "VP Sales, fintech, based in Italy or Spain" type lists — and the results were genuinely good. 60, 80 leads that actually matched. Then I hit the part nobody warns you about: there's no button on that page that says "save this." So I did what everyone does. Opened a spreadsheet, alt-tabbed back and forth, typed names and job titles by hand. Around profile 40 I gave up and went looking for a better way. This is what I found, roughly in the order I found it, including the tool I ended up building because none of the existing options quite fit what I needed. First: the export LinkedIn actually gives you LinkedIn has a real, built-in data export, and most people don't realize how narrow it is. It's under your profile photo → Settings & Privacy → Data Privacy → Get a copy of your data . From there you either tick specific categories (that email usually lands within minutes) or request the full archive, which takes closer to a day and sometimes arrives in two batches. Either way you get a download link that expires after 72 hours — and it's desktop only, the mobile app won't let you request one. What you get back is genuinely thorough: connections, messages, your own profile history, activity, even the ad-targeting data LinkedIn holds on you. A couple of quirks worth knowing before you rely on it: some connections' email addresses will just be missing, because sharing an email on download is something each person opts into individually, and you won't get a list of who viewed your profile or any "People You May Know" data. If you're in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland, LinkedIn also runs a separate API for pulling your data on a schedule rather than as a one-off request. Here's what this export is not built for, though: it has no idea what you searched for yesterday. It's an archive of your own account, not a way to capture a live search. Run a Sales Navigator query and pull 80 lea