Orion's Belt

Download all your facebook information

Did you know that you could download all of your Facebook information in one go?

Go to Account settings. There should be a 'Download your information' option right at the bottom.



Facebook introduced this service back in October 2010. Anyone who wants a copy of the information can request a zip file. Facebook will take some time in making the file, and in about 6 hours, your information should be ready. At least mine was - and it was 125 Mb in size.





What information do you get? According to Facebook,

"Your file will include the following information:

  • Your profile information (e.g., your contact information, interests, groups)
  • Wall posts and content that you and your friends have posted to your profile
  • Photos and videos that you have uploaded to your account
  • Your friend list
  • Notes you have created
  • Events to which you have RSVP’d
  • Your sent and received messages
  • Any comments that you and your friends have made on your Wall posts, photos, and other profile content"

And there is no way to choose which data you can download. It's either everything or nothing.

This is really helpful if, by chance, you lose all your data on your hard disk. Or you just want a backup of all your facebook content.

The profile information includes everything that you put on your profile on facebook, including all pages that you liked, all groups that you joined, all your relationships, etc. in an html format (with the information as text).

It also includes all photos, videos, comments by friends, wall posts, notes, events, messages, and one friend list which has all friends listed in a table, as facebook itself said.

What it doesn't include, however, are custom friend lists! So if you've divided your friend list into separate lists of school friends and college friends, there is no way of getting that information.

The number of 'likes' on a post are included, but who liked it, is not shown.

All of this is in an indexed html file. There are also separate folders for photos and videos, so each album has it's own folder. If you've put captions on your pics, then those become the file names. If the captions include symbols like ' :) ' or '<3' then the filename becomes ' ) ' or ' 3'.

The pics are of the size shown in your facebook album, unless you uploaded a high resolution image. Videos are in .mp4 format.

More information regarding this topic is found here.

One thing confuses me though - After I download my information once, when can I download newer information? When I go back to the download page, it just gives me an option to download the same thing again. What if I want to download after a few days, and I want all newer information to be included too?

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