Backups are important. I’m sure you’re already in the habit of backing up your laptop and smartphone to protect your vital data. You probably use some cloud services to store original or backup data off site where you can get at it from any machine, even if your local device dies or is stolen or whatever. But what would you do if your favourite social media platform vanished overnight? Have you backed up all that data? Would you miss it? The photos, the life events, the funny comments shared with friends? Take action now and back up your social media content, and stick a reminder in your diary to do so again at an interval that makes sense for you, whether you’re a casual user, or an addict like me!
Note: The instructions below are for views of these platforms in a regular web browser on a laptop. Backup/download options don’t appear to be available in the mobile apps I’ve checked.
Backing up Facebook data
- Click the down arrow (
) at the right of the top blue bar when you’re logged in and viewing Facebook. - In the popup menu that appears, click Settings.
- At the bottom of the General Account Settings page, click Download a copy of your Facebook data.
- On the page that appears, click Start My Archive.
- When prompted, enter your password to prove it’s really you and click Submit.
- Click Start my Archive again in the confirmation dialog that appears.
Facebook will create an archive for you to download and send a download link to your registered email address. For me, this email took just a few minutes to arrive. - Click the link in Facebook’s email, and on the page that appears, click Download Archive.
- Enter your password again when prompted and click Submit.
You’ll be prompted to select a download destination and filename for the zip file with your data. - Extract/unpack the downloaded zip file and open the index.htm file from the top-level folder to browse your data.
) at the right of the top blue bar when you’re logged in and viewing Facebook.For details of what will be included in your archive, see this page. You might be surprised how much data Facebook has on you!
Backing up Twitter data
- Click the icon of your profile pic at the right-hand end of the top bar when you’re logged in and viewing Twitter.
- In the popup menu that appears, click Settings.
- Scroll down, and near the bottom of the page click the Request your archive link.
No additional password requirements this time, just wait for an email with a link to arrive. For me, this was almost instantaneous. - Click the Download now link in your email, and the Download link on the web page that opens.
You’ll be prompted to select a download destination and filename for the zip file with your data. - Extract/unpack the downloaded zip file and open the index.htm file from the top-level folder to browse your tweets.
The data is also available in a tweets.csv file in the same folder.
Backing up Google+ data
Google provide a tool called Google Takeout that allows you to archive data from a variety of Google services. For the purposes of this description, we’re only going to back up Google+ data.
- Go to the Google Takeout page at https://www.google.com/settings/takeout.
- Toggle on/off the Google data you want to back up. For Google+, this will be your +1s, Google+ Circles, Google+ Pages, and Google+ Stream.
- Click Next.
- Select the backup File type you want (I’m going with .zip for consistency!), and the Delivery method (again, I’m going with email for consistency, but you can request that the archive to go your Google Drive instead).
- Click Create archive.
Despite having far less content on this platform than FB and Twitter, this archive took longer to generate, but I still had an email with a link in my Gmail after several minutes. - Click the Download archive link in the email, and enter your password to confirm it’s really you.
You’ll be prompted to select a download destination and filename for the zip file with your data. - Extract/unpack the downloaded zip file and open the index.htm file from the Takeout folder to browse your data.
Hi Sharon,
Thanks for this really useful post. It had never actually occurred to me before to back up my social media. Now that I’ve woken up to this, I realise that I really should back up the data on the Facebook business page I manage – but it seems that there is not a ready way to do so for business pages as there is with personal Facebook profile pages. It appears that the only way to back up the page is through a commercial app like backupify.
Have you come across any hacks to allow a page administrator back up their own data without having to use a paid-for service?
Siobhán.
Hmm – good question, Siobhan! Have done a bit of digging, and don’t see an obvious way to do this without a third party tool. There’s talk of an “expanded archive” option, which was being rolled out to select users a couple of years back, but some later posts/articles suggest it was quietly removed again. Will keep an eye out, and if I see a good solution, I’ll post again.