Facebook is a well established social networking website. Your facebook data may include photos of you and your family, places you have visited, some posts disclosing your political beliefs, facebook search inquiries and a lot more personal about you. Facebook has made it simpler to manage your data. But many facebook users have not even any idea about that. Many users do not even know that they can download their facebook data.
Facebook has put extra efforts to explain privacy controls and help users find accurate information about what and how much Facebook knows about them. It also launched a new feature called access your information. This feature has a more user friendly interface discovering, downloading and deleting personal facebook data. Some users use third party engines and browser developments to download facebook data. But that is not required because facebook offers this feature to download all facebook data through facebook.
What does your facebook data contain?
- About me (personal information including name, education, work, relationship status etc)
- Account status history (when your facebook account was activated, deactivated, reactivated or deleted)
- Active sessions (all active sessions including time, date, device, IP address, browser information and machine cookies)
- Advertisements clicked (time, dates and titles of advertisements clicked by you)
- Address (your current and past addresses you had on your facebook account)
- Alternate names (list of alternate names you have on your account)
- Photos and videos (you have uploaded or you are tagged in or you have shared)
- Applications (all applications added by you)
- Birthday perceptibility (how your birthday appears on your facebook timeline)
- Chats (complete message history including the messages you have deleted or you never respond)
- Check-ins (the places you have visited and checked into)
- Credit cards (in case you make purchase on facebook)
- Current location (the current location you have added to your timeline)
- Deleted friends (your facebook friends you have removed)
- Events (you have joined or invited to attend)
- Family (your facebook friends you have indicated as family members)
- Followers (list of people following you)
- Hidden news feeds (friends, pages or apps you have hidden from your news feed)
- Logins, logouts (complete history)
- Pokes (list of people who poked you or whom you poked)
Why to download facebook data:
There can be many reasons to download facebook photos or other data.
- You have lost or deleted your old photos; you can get back from facebook photos (if you have uploaded there).
- You want the backup of your facebook messages.
- Lost your mobile phone and you have all your photos on facebook then you can get back.
- You want to know what kind of information Facebook has about you or you want to backup whole facebook data.
Below I have mentioned a step by step guide to determine, download or delete the facebook data.
Step1:
To access the facebook information just login to your facebook account on a web browser. You can’t perform this action through the Facebook application. In the top right corner of the homepage you can see a downward pointing icon (next to the quick help icon). Click that icon and you have a list of options. Select and click “settings”.
Step2:
Go to “general account setting” option. On this page you can see your account details such as name, username and contact etc. See the last option on this page “download a copy of your facebook data”. Click this option.
Step3:
Now the next page contains the information about the download process. You can see the heading on the top of the page “download your information”. Click the link “start my archives”. Facebook will send you a notification saying “it may take a few minutes to create your achieve”. Facebook sends an email to the email address associated with your facebook account to inform you that your data is requested to download. Then it sends another mail to inform you that your Facebook data is ready to download.
Step4:
Leave your email open to check the notifications regarding facebook data download. Facebook shares a link through email to make sure that the data download request is genuine.
Step5:
Click the link. After clicking the link you will be navigated to your browser (download your information page of facebook). You have the “download archive” link on your screen. Click this link to start the download process.
Step6:
After that a pop up window will appear on your screen asking you for your facebook password. Type your password (to prove and verify your identity) and click submits to proceed.
Step7:
Now the download process has begun. The downloading time varies depending on the file size, amount of data available on your facebook account. If you were an active user then there must be a huge amount of data to download so it will take more time.
When you download your Facebook data, it is in the form of a local mini website. All the files are arranged in a folder. When you click this folder you have an index.hdm file. If you open this file it will launch in your browser. The first page that appears is your facebook profile page containing a summary of your personal information on facebook. To see what else is there in your facebook data click any of the links present below your profile picture. There may be some major points of interest you want to check before anything else such as messages, photos or security.
So now you have this complete information at one place in your ownership. Now you can keep it or delete it. Click clear to delete everything or click the down arrow for the right of any photo or post to delete it separately. Once you delete something from your facebook account it takes 90 days to disappear from the servers of facebook.
Conclusion:
So I think this is a very cool feature of facebook. Many times we lose our precious photos and videos due to various reasons. In that case we want to get that data back. But downloading the photos or videos one by one from the facebook takes a lot of time. So downloading whole data in this way is a better option. So guys, if you also want to get back the photos and videos from your facebook account, then follow these steps and get back easily. I hope the people searching for “how to download facebook data” on Google, now got their answer.
