Tip of the Week: A Step-By-Step Guide to Downloading Your Facebook Information

The longer you use Facebook, the more personal content you hand over to the social media empire. Sharing content is what drives the social media experience, but what if you want your content back? Surprisingly, Facebook makes this easy.

The reasons to download your personal content from Facebook can vary. Perhaps you just feel better about having a backup copy of your data stored locally. Or maybe you’re working on a picture collage and want to use several of the images you’ve uploaded to Facebook. Or, as is more often the case, perhaps you’re fed up with Facebook and you want to leave it for good, but before you close your account, you would like to download your data.

Whatever your reason may be for needing to download your personal data, Facebook makes it easy. After all, it’s not like Facebook has any reason to make this process difficult, since they technically own whatever content you upload, whether or not you download it back or even close your account.

To get started, log in to Facebook and go to Settings. Below General Account Settings you will see Download a copy of your Facebook data, click on it. Next, click Start My Archive.

This will allow you to select a place to store your information, just like you would with any Internet download. Whichever folder you select to download your Facebook data into, make sure that’s it’s secure, seeing as it will likely contain sensitive data.

What kind of information is included when you download your archive? Facebook explains, “This includes a lot of the same information available to you in your account and activity log, including your Timeline info, posts you have shared, messages, photos and more. Additionally, it includes information that is not available simply by logging into your account, like the ads you have clicked on, data like the IP addresses that are logged when you log into or out of Facebook, and more.”

Depending on how much you’ve used Facebook in the past, this can be a rather large download. Although, at the end of the day, downloading everything in one fell swoop is much more convenient than going through every single Facebook post, selecting what to and what not to download.

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