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Twitter/X
Updated Sep 28, 2026
X, formerly Twitter, keeps less of your account than any of the big social platforms and is fairly candid about it. The archive holds the tweets still on the service and nothing that has been deleted. Direct messages are included unless the other account has since been suspended, in which case that conversation is not in the archive and cannot be requested on its own.
What you'll get
TweetsDirect MessagesLikesMomentsFollowsAd Engagement
Before you start
- This one only works on the desktop site. There is no archive option anywhere in the app.
- Go to Settings and privacy, then Your account, then Download an archive of your data.
- Have your password to hand, and know your username as well. X asks for both, and the prompt about locked accounts after several failed attempts is real.
- Warn yourself about the size. An archive with media for an old account is measured in gigabytes, and a laptop with 200GB of free space will lose the race.
How to download
- Click Request archive. You get a dialog asking you to confirm you want the whole thing, not a date range. There is no way to ask for less than all of it.
- Confirm with your password.
- Go and check the email. Not now, in an hour or so. The first batch usually appears within a few minutes, and the slower parts later.
- When the link arrives, download the ZIP and extract it. The front page is an index.html that opens your whole archive in a browser.
Pro tip
X builds the archive in stages and emails you when the first batch is ready, not when the whole thing is done. The email is not the archive, it is an invitation to come back later. People who request it and forget to check are the ones finding the notification six months on.
After the download
- Understand what the archive is not. It has no restore function, it will not bring back a tweet you deleted, and it does not include DMs with accounts that have since been suspended. X cannot give you what X has thrown away.
- Your timeline is inside a file called data.js, which looks like JavaScript and is not. It is a JSON array pretending to be a script, and every decent JSON tool will still read it once you change the extension.
- The likes are organised by month rather than by year, which tells you something about how often the file manager expects you to be opening it.
- The ad engagement file is the most uncomfortable one. It lists every ad you were shown, and which ones you clicked, all with timestamps.
- Direct messages are the slow part of the build and the heavy part of the ZIP. If the request seems stuck, this is normally why.