Done with Facebook? Here’s how to move all your data to another service

Now that you’ve finally decided to ditch Facebook and either to move on sans social media or migrate to a new platform, what do you do about the years of data you’ve accumulated on Facebook? Posts, images, thoughts — some regrettable, some not — and more, where do they go? Is it possible to archive your rich Facebook history, or better yet, to migrate it to a new platform entirely?

As expected, there’s no direct data migration service available — Facebook wouldn’t want to make it so simple to just ditch the platform — but you do have several options for exporting all the data you generated on your Facebook account.

How to transfer your information to another service

First, head to Facebook Settings or your Facebook Accounts Centre. Clicking on either of the links will take you to the relevant page if you’re already logged into Facebook.

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Here, scroll down and click on ‘Transfer your information’ in the left side bar. Now select the relevant account in the window that pops up, then select the information that you want to transfer — everything or a custom transfer, and click next.

On this tab, you can select a frequency of transfer if you want periodic backups, or you can select a single transfer for a one-time backup. You’ll also need to select a destination for your data. The options that Facebook gives you for this transfer are Google Photos, Dropbox, Koofr, Photobucket, or Backblaze B2. Choose a relevant service and just wait for Facebook to complete the transfer.

Additionally, you can choose to download your information directly from Facebook from the same Facebook Settings or Accounts Centre page by clicking ‘Download your information’. Just follow the on-screen instructions to get Facebook to download a copy of all your data to your device. The data can also be transferred to another service from within this window if you change your mind about downloading it.

Things to keep in mind

Bear in mind that this download or transfer process only downloads or transfers data that you’ve created or uploaded on your own Facebook account page. Anything you wrote or posted on a friend’s page will not be downloaded or transferred. This applies to photos and videos as well.

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In addition, data on likes is also not downloadable or transferrable, but event calendars and notes can be transferred.

And that’s it! The process of backing up and downloading data from Facebook is quite easy. There’s no possible way to seamlessly migrate this data to another social media platform right now, but you will have a copy of your Facebook data to refer to and to pull data from if you wish to repost old data.