If you were ever interested in downloading a copy of your Facebook account, well, the company that owns the social network offers you the opportunity to download an archive that contains all the information published by you on your own account.
Facebook is just one of the companies that offers the possibility to archive users' accounts, and this with the idea of allowing them to return to using their services in the event that they ever decide to temporarily close their account.
How to make a copy of Facebook account
To make a copy of the Facebook account must :
- You access the social network Facebook.com.
- Access the menu Settings by pressing the last button on the top right, the upper menu is visible.
- Access the section General.
- In it you will see an option called Download a copy of your Facebook time.
- Press the word Download a copy and you will be directed to a new page where you will have to press the button Start my archive to initiate data archiving. This procedure could take up to several hours.
- Now you confirm the initiation of the procedure by entering your account password, Facebook notifying you that you will receive an email when the archiving has been completed.
- After the archiving has been completed, you will receive an email from which you will have to access the download link to download the archive containing the copy of the Facebook account.
The respective archive can be unzipped with an unzipping program and you will be able to access all the data saved by the Facebook company for your account.
What data is saved
According to the Facebook company, the archive containing a copy of your Facebook account it has available all the pictures and video clips published by you in the account, but also all the conversations held with various friends through the Messenger system, so you can have everything on your computer.
The files with your data can have different sizes depending on the age in the network and the multimedia content, so we are talking about archives that can be hundreds of MB, GB or even tens of GB, the multimedia files being saved in their normal format.
According to Facebook, this is the entire list of saved data:
- About Me: Information you added to the About section of your Timeline like relationships, work, education, where you live and more. It includes any updates or changes you made in the past and what is currently in the About section of your Timeline.
- Account Status History: The dates when your account was reactivated, deactivated, disabled or deleted.
- Active Sessions: All stored active sessions, including date, time, device, IP address, machine cookie and browser information.
- Ads Clicked: Dates, times and titles of ads clicked (limited retention period).
- Address: Your current address or any past addresses you had on your account.
- Ad Topics: A list of topics that you may be targeted against based on your stated likes, interests and other data you put in your Timeline.
- Alternate Name: Any alternate names you have on your account (eg: a maiden name or a nickname).
- Apps: All of the apps you have added.
- Birthday Visibility: How your birthday appears on your Timeline.
- Chat: A history of the conversations you've had on Facebook Chat (a complete history is available directly from your messages inbox).
- Check-Ins: The places you've checked into.
- Currency: Your preferred currency on Facebook. If you use Facebook Payments, this will be used to display prices and charge your credit cards.
- Current City: The city you added to the About section of your Timeline.
- Date of Birth: The date you added to Birthday in the About section of your Timeline.
- Deleted Friends: People you've removed as friends.
- Education: Any information you added to the Education field in the About section of your Timeline.
- Emails: Email addresses added to your account (even those you may have removed).
- Events: Events you've joined or been invited to.
- Facial Recognition Data: A unique number based on a comparison of the photos you're tagged in. We use this data to help others tag you in photos.
- Family: Friends you've indicated are family members.
- Favorite Quotes: Information you've added to the Favorite Quotes section of the About section of your Timeline.
- Followers: A list of people who follow you.
- Friend Requests: Pending sent and received friend requests.
- Friends: A list of your friends.
- Gender: The gender you added to the About section of your Timeline.
- Groups: A list of groups you belong to on Facebook.
- Hidden from News Feed: Any friends, apps or pages you've hidden from your News Feed.
- Hometown: The place you added to hometown in the About section of your Timeline.
- IP Addresses: A list of IP addresses where you've logged into your Facebook account (won't include all historical IP addresses as they are deleted according to a retention schedule).
- Locale: The language you've selected to use Facebook in.
- logins: IP address, date and time associated with logins to your Facebook account.
- Logouts: IP address, date and time associated with logouts from your Facebook account.
- posts: Messages you've sent and received on Facebook. Note, if you've deleted a message it won't be included in your download as it has been deleted from your account.
- Name: The name on your Facebook account.
- Name Changes: Any changes you've made to the original name you used when you signed up for Facebook.
- Networks: Networks (affiliations with schools or workplaces) that you belong to on Facebook.
- Notification Settings: A list of all your notification preferences and whether you have email and text enabled or disabled for each.
- Pages You Admin: A list of pages you admin.
- Pending Friend Requests: Pending sent and received friend requests.
- Telephone Numbers: Mobile phone numbers you've added to your account, including verified mobile numbers you've added for security purposes.
- Photos: Photos you've uploaded to your account.
- Photos Metadata: Any metadata that is transmitted with your uploaded photos.
- Physical Tokens: Badges you've added to your account.
- Pokes: A list of who's poked you and who you've poked. Poke content from our mobile poke app is not included because it is only available for a short period of time. After the recipient has viewed the content it is permanently deleted from our systems.
- Political Views: Any information you add to Political Views in the About section of Timeline.
- Posts by Others: Anything posted to your Timeline by someone else, like wall posts or links shared on your Timeline by friends.
- Privacy Settings: Your privacy settings.
- Recent Activities: Actions you've taken and interactions you've recently had.
- Registration Date: The date you joined Facebook.
- Religious Views: The current information you added to Religious Views in the About section of your Timeline.
- Screen Names: The screen names you've added to your account, and the service they're associated with. You can also see if they're hidden or visible on your account.
- Spoken Languages: The languages you added to Spoken Languages in the About section of your Timeline.
- Status Updates: Any status updates you've posted.
- Works: Any current information you've added to Work in the About section of your Timeline.
- Videos: Videos you've posted to your Timeline.
What is the utility?
An archive with a copy of your Facebook account could be very useful when you decide to delete your account from the social network, but you don't want to lose all the available data, Facebook saving everything related to your account, with a varied range of data that can be restored if you think about reopening your account.
