HOW TO: Download Your Information from Facebook

An article by Prashish Rajbhandari    2 Comments

Today at Facebook event in Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg announced that users will now be able to download their information directly from facebook into your hard disk. Zuckerberg said:

“People own and have control over all info they put into Facebook and “Download Your Information” enables people to take stuff with them,”

Now people have that option to back up your pictures, videos, messages , wall posts, friend lists and all other information which was not possible before this. This is a great feature which will help people back up their information and yes, view their facebook profile OFFLINE or share it with friends.

The feature is scheduled to roll out today. Once it is active, you need to follow this procedure to back up all your data.

1 ) Go to Account -> Account Settings

2 ) You will see a new section – Download Your Information. Click ‘learn more’

3 ) Now, click on Download.

4 ) It will ask you to wait for sometime so that facebook gathers all your information and compresses it into a .zip file. It will take sometime. Once it is done, it will send you an email in your mailbox.

5 ) When you receive the email, click on the given link.

6 ) Re-enter your password and answer a simple security question.

7 ) Now you will have an option to download a .zip file containing all your facebook information

8 ) After you download the file, unzip it

9 ) Now you can actually view your profile as a simple HTML page with simple links like wall posts, messages, photos, videos etc.

Zuckerberg was asked if users can actually upload that information in other websites. He answered:

“At a high level we’ve built two different things, Facebook Connect — which is our real effort to bring our sites to other sites, and with “Download Your Information” you can download that information and upload it to another site. Stuff that you put into the site, you should be able to take out.”

More to follow. Follow us at @fortystones.

Full Information at Official Facebook Blog.

If you have not yet received the feature, don’t panic. Its on its way