Facebook: download your data

Everybody’s “favourite” social network promised it last week and, apparently, it’s beginning to role out for users this week: the ability to download ALL your information from Facebook.

Every photo. Every video. Every wall post, email, event and piece of profile information. In one zip file. At the click of a button. The only limitation, if you’ve been tagged on someone else’s photo, that won’t be downloaded. Annoying but it does make sense (it’s not your photo after all).

The ability to download this wealth of information is beginning to appear across Facebook’s 500m user accounts as I write (find it under Account > Account Settings, there will be a download option at the bottom of the page).

Be prepared for a large download though, possibly in the 100s of megabytes.

It’s not appeared on my account yet but, as soon as it does, I’ll be taking advantage. Why? Not quite sure if I’m honesty. It just feels like something I should do. Maybe to trawl through all my old stuff, see what I thought about ‘x’ on a certain date. It might even generate some ideas for new blog posts!