Save Yourself From Devastation; Download Your Facebook Data

This 1 minute 9 step process will save you a world of hurt

Flote community member Patrick Smith of Disenthrall is one of the unfortunate victims of Facebook's arbitrary and ambiguous community guidelines. One day, he awoke to the deactivation of his Facebook account. He lost years of his digital life with no real recourse.

There are very few experiences quite like having a large and vital organ of your digital body and life amputated without warning.

When facebook banned me I lost hundreds of chat sessions with people I care about, thousands of connections to people I wanted to follow and that wanted to hear when I spoke, tens of thousands of images and videos I had created, multiple pages and groups with thousands of members and followers.

I will never again trust an activist corporation to steward my online presence and neither should you.
Until we have a competent decentralized solution that allows us to network socially without a centralized framework Flote is the most free option available and possible. As evidence of this see my chat with the heads of the company where I challenge them very thoroughly on their censorship and content restriction policies here: https://flote.app/post/ff256d36-60af-4602-81a3-28a533968c46

Facebook users live under the constant threat of this reality. And with Facebook announcing an update to its terms of service, you can be certain that as of October 1, 2020, this is going to be a much more common occurrence.

9 Steps to Avoiding Heartache

Step 1. Login to Facebook

Step 2. Click the arrow in the top right corner of your browser and choose "Settings & Privacy" and then "Settings."

Step 3. From the Settings page, choose "Your Facebook Information" from the left navigation menu.

Step 4. Choose "Download Your Information."

Step 5. On the "Download Your Information" page you can request a copy of your data. You can choose a date range, the format, and the media quality. If this is your first time downloading your data, you should choose to download all of your data.

Step 6. Select what type of data you would like to download. Again, if this is your first time downloading your profile, you should select all.

Step 7. Once you've made your selections, click the create button. Facebook will process your request and notify you when your file is complete. You can find the file in the Available Copies tab. Your file expires within a few days. Be sure to keep a record of the date and time of your request.

Step 8. Periodically create a new download with a date range from your last download to the present date.

Step 9. Review your data, and update your privacy settings so you share only information that you want to share.

What Next?

Now that you've secured your data, you may want to consider if you want to continue to support a big tech company that is willing to deny you access to your account while continuing to sell it to corporate interests.

If the answer is no, you are not alone.

Join the fleet of users who are jumping ship and joining Flote. Flote is a social network committed to safeguarding user privacy and freedom of expression. We will never sell your data. That's a promise.

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