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SocialFacebook
Updated Sep 28, 2026
Facebook is the largest social network archive on the internet, and what comes back goes a lot further than posts and photos. Your messages, an activity log from other apps you never connected it to, and the advertising profile Meta built about you are all in there. The download is enormous and slow, and the folder structure is famously hard to browse, which is the part people most often underestimate.
What you'll get
PostsPhotosVideosMessagesAd InterestsSearch History
Before you start
- Do this on desktop in a browser. The mobile app has no download option and people waste a good ten minutes looking for one.
- Go to facebook.com/settings, then Settings, then Your Facebook information.
- Decide whether you want messages before you tick anything. They are a separate selection and they roughly double the size of the request.
- Clear your downloads folder if you are short on space. A full archive with messages can be tens of gigabytes.
How to download
- Click Download your information, then choose your file format. JSON is the raw data. HTML opens your profile, posts and photos in a browser, which is a far better way to actually look at it.
- Hit Deselect all. Everything is selected by default and the default is enormous.
- Tick what you want. Posts and Photos is the one everybody means. Messages and Messenger is the one people are surprised by.
- Click Create File. Nothing is emailed straight away. Facebook builds it first, which is the slow part.
- The email arrives with a download link, and Facebook also puts a notification on the site. The link is short lived, a few days, so do not file the email away and forget it.
Pro tip
Messages are not part of the main export. If you want them you have to tick a second box labelled something like Messages and Messenger, and Facebook will warn you it is a much bigger request. Decide before you click Create File, because adding them afterwards means doing the whole thing twice.
After the download
- The off-Facebook activity log is the file worth reading. It is a list of every app and data broker that has sent Meta information about you, with dates, and it is regularly the most upsetting file in any export any of us have run.
- Ad topics is a list of everything Meta thinks you are interested in, and every single one is removable at facebook.com/adpreferences. Doing that is the actual point of downloading the file.
- The ad library file tells you which ads you were shown and which ones you clicked, all timestamped.
- Your messages arrive as one JSON file per conversation, named after the person, in a folder nested several levels deep. There is no reader that handles this well on a Mac or PC, so budget an evening or use one of the third-party viewers.
- Searching facebook.com/search/history afterward is the one way to clear the log. Downloading it does not clear anything.