A lot of people may not have been aware of this Facebook feature that would allow you to backup your content which was announced some time ago but may have only just been rolled out to users. In the past, if you wanted to download all of your photos you had to go through a painful process of clicking through each one and downloading manually. Not an exciting activity by any means so I figured it was a good opportunity to spread the message.
Here are the steps you need to follow to backup your Facebook content:
Facebook - Download Your Information
- On the Facebook site click on “Account” then “Account Settings”,
- Click on “Learn More” under “Download Your Information”,
- Click on “Download” and then “Download” again,
- Wait for an email from Facebook,
- Once the email arrives, click on the link and then verify your password,
- Click on “Download Now” and off you go.
Facebook - Request My Download
You’ll download a zip file which will contain many files of which one will be “index.html” – if you extract the entire contents of the zip file to a folder on your computer and open the index.html file you will be able to view your Facebook content locally.
You might choose to do this every so often to keep a local copy of your content. Remember, even though this content is “up in the cloud” if you don’t backup you can’t get it back!
3 comments
nice one boydo! thanks for that!
nice one!
i am wondering if there is a ‘restore’ function too. for instance, if i back up my information, then delete my profile, then recreate it, can i use something to restore from my back up?
Author
Hi Jay,
If there is such a feature it’s not immediately apparent. The original intent of the feature was to facilitate the easy retrieval of all uploaded content instead of resorting to manually downloading each object individually. This was especially problematic when users wanted to use other services to distribute their content.
Having said that, when you elect to remove your Facebook account it doesn’t get deleted immediately but instead goes into a disabled mode for a period of time. I guess this gives people a cooling off period to make sure they want to go through with the deletion.
From a security or data integrity perspective it could become problematic when people download their history, delete their page, reinstate it and then fabricate their past history prior to upload. Someone would need to be incredibly motivated to do it and could perhaps lead to pages impersonating others (i.e. identity theft).
Having said all of the above genuine users would find it handy to reinstate everything but I would probably recommend they disable their accounts in the first place instead of a full blown deletion.