Want to Download Your Entire Facebook Profile?

If you’re like me, you may use (parts of) Facebook for very specific purposes.  At some point, you may want to access an ‘aged’ post but you don’t want to have to go through the time or effort of hitting the “older posts” link a bizillian times.  Facebook recently created a mechanism whereby you can easily download your entire Facebook profile , the contents of which are flat.  No ‘older posts’ button!  If you’d like to download your profile, here’s how.

• Log into your Facebook account.
• Click on Account in the upper right hand corner.
• Select Account Settings from the drop down.
• Select the learn more link associated with Download Your Information
• Click the Download button
• A Request My Download popup window will appear.  Click the Download button.
• The message in the popup window will change to include the statement, “You will receive an email when your archive is ready for download.  Click OK
• A new screen will appear letting you know that the download is Pending….  Close out of this screen.  It won’t prompt you to do so and it won’t go away on its own.
• Depending upon the size of your Facebook presence, it may take several hours before you receive an email from Facebook notifying you that “Your download is ready”.

 

Because of some of their security precautions, things can start to get interesting and possibly entertaining after you click the link in the email. 

• Type in your Facebook password when prompted and then click Continue
  A warning screen will appear stating, “This file contains sensitive information.  Because this download contains your profile information, you should keep it secure and take precautions when storing, sending or uploading it to any other services.”
• This screen also includes a Security Check message.  For the next 5 screens, you’ll be given 3 photos per screen.  Each screen will be for one of your “Friends” and you’ll be given 5 possible names to choose from.  You need to match a name to the photo.

 

You would think that this would be easey but there were kid photos for people that I’ve only known for a few years and there were darkly lit, fuzzy  photos of performance artists (of which I know several).  Luckily, you have the opportunity to “skip” two identifications and be prompted with two new “Friend”-challenges instead.

After you pass the challenge tests , you can download your Facebook profile to your PC.  It will come packaged as a .zip file. Unzip the file and voila you have a snapshot of your Facebook contents to date.