How to download a backup copy of your Twitter data (or deactivate your account)

Big variations are underway at Twitter as we speak—including new leadership—and some persons are anxious about what the long run may possibly carry for the social network. Points may end up completely high-quality, but even in tranquil occasions, it really is excellent to know how to get a duplicate of your Twitter information for neighborhood safekeeping—or to deactivate your Twitter account if you select. This puts regulate of your details in your arms.

Just before we start out, it is important to know that the course of action of finding a copy of your Twitter facts can choose 24 several hours or a lot more. Twitter does this both of those for safety motives and ostensibly to give its servers time to get the thorough info it will mail you.

Also, you can have to have an e-mail deal with or mobile mobile phone number registered to your Twitter account so the web site can ship you a particular confirmation code to full the system. Once you have the knowledge, you will get a area duplicate of all of your tweets that you can store indefinitely without needing to log in to Twitter.

How to ask for your Twitter knowledge on desktop or mobile

To get a duplicate of your Twitter info, you initially require to full a ask for approach. To get started out, log in to Twitter.com or open the Twitter application working with the account for which you’d like to request an archive.

If you might be on the Twitter web site, click “A lot more” in the sidebar, then simply click “Options and Assist.” On the cell Twitter application, just faucet “Options and Assistance” in the sidebar. When that menu expands, click on or faucet “Options and Privacy.”

Less than “Settings,” decide on “Your account,” then simply click or faucet “Down load an archive of your facts.”

Just after verifying your password, Twitter will send out a verification code to both your email address or a cellular mobile phone number by way of a textual content concept, depending on what you decide on.

Following you get the code, variety it into Twitter, and you are going to be again on the “Down load an archive of your details” web page. Below “Twitter data,” simply click the “Ask for archive” button.

Twitter will start making ready your archive, which can just take 24 hrs or far more to finish.

When the archive is ready, you can expect to get a notification through e-mail and/or a pop-up notification in the Twitter app. On the Twitter site or in the application, navigate to “Options and privacy” > “Your account” > “Obtain an archive of your information” to download the ZIP file that is made up of your knowledge.

What is in the Twitter details you get?

When you’ve got downloaded the ZIP file, extract it into a folder on a Pc, Mac, or Linux. In that folder, you can open up “Your archive.html” in a typical website browser and look as a result of your Twitter knowledge locally, which is now hosted on your computer system in that folder.

The Twitter account knowledge you can obtain arrives as a ZIP file, viewable in a regional internet browser on a Personal computer or Mac, which features your tweets and immediate messages, account info and background, applications and units you’ve got employed, accounts you have blocked or muted, and promoting profile info.

A observe about immediate messages

From our experimentation, we have found that Twitter immediate messages (DMs) will be retained in Twitter’s servers as prolonged as one particular person in the chat does not delete them. So even if you delete your DM historical past with a individual, the other man or woman you chatted with will continue to have a duplicate of your shared DM record. But if both equally men and women in the DM chat delete the immediate message discussion, it disappears from your Twitter archive (and very likely from Twitter’s servers) endlessly. So if you have delicate DMs you would like to erase, question the other party to delete their DM chat historical past with you as properly.

How to deactivate your Twitter account

If you’ve got by now downloaded your Twitter facts and experience like you might be prepared to take the much more remarkable action of deactivating or deleting your account, then log in to Twitter.com or open the Twitter application working with the account you’d like to deactivate.

Applying the sidebar, navigate to “Settings and privacy” > “Your account” > “Deactivate your account.” On that website page, you’ll see a number of disclaimers about how deactivation operates, but they aren’t apparent about deletion. Consulting Twitter’s support pages reveals more detail about the method: Deactivation can be reversed for up to 30 days. Right after that, your Twitter account and all linked info will be completely deleted.

If you might be all set, click on “Deactivate.”

Even right after clicking “Deactivate,” you’ll have to have to enter your Twitter password and go by way of an additional confirmation prompt.

When comprehensive, your Twitter account will deactivate, and your tweets will vanish from the internet site inside of a several minutes. If you modify your intellect, log in again inside 30 times and your account will reactivate. But if you do not log in once more in 30 days, your account will be deleted for good.