Thread by @dosmeow

Take a minute this morning to archive your Twitter account!

Did you know Twitter lets you download a complete archive of all your Tweets, posted images, likes, and DMs that you can then browse and search locally on your computer? [1/9] 🧵

The process is simple, though it will take time before its ready. You'll need to know your current Twitter PW as well as having access to the email account associated with your Twitter account.

Click "More" -> "Settings and Support" and then "Settings and privacy" to begin
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Then, head to "Your account" where there will be an option to "Download and archive of your data". You'll be prompted to confirm your identity by entering a code sent to your associated email address.
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Once verified, there will be a button to request a copy of your archive. Give it a click and wait patiently. (I'm still waiting for mine, but still have my copy from Dec. 2020 the last time I requested an archive.) [4/9]

Eventually, you should get an email like this one with a Download link that will expire in a month. Depending on how much media you've posted and how long you've been around, this will likely be a few gigabytes in size. Open the zip file and extract its contents somewhere. [5/9]

My data from 2008 through 2020 here is a little more than 6 gigs. (Keep in mind that anything shown now is from 2020 so the details may have changed while I await my 2022 archive).

You'll wind up with something like this. With "Your archive.html" being the important one [6/9]

Open that file and you'll see a basic webpage with links to view your tweets, likes, DMs, etc. It's surprisingly robust! You can search by date range and filter to tweets with media or not. Plus links to the original on Twitter if you want to share. [7/9]

Though it isn't perfect! Quote Retweets don't embed, just being replaced with a short link to the original tweet. The Likes don't contain any information on the account so it's a wall of blank icons with with links and text only. DMs _do_ have media included though! [8/9]

Regardless of what comes next for the site & its userbase, your tweets have captured your life. That's important! Keep your own archive & worry less about the future. We all should all try to make it a habit to regularly archive our data because once it's gone, it's gone. [9/9]

Bonus: This is something worth doing whether you think Twitter is going to become a ghost town in 6 months or be thriving in 6 decades. The more frequently you back up your data, the less you risk losing if something happens to the site, foreseen or otherwise.

Bonus bonus: And for more tech oriented folks, all the data is spread out across well-labeled JS files containing JSON objects, so doing more heavy work with it is an option!

and the next morning you'll get this

Go back to the settings page and now the button starts the download. Though it looks like they only keep it around for a week now rather than a month so don't put it off for too long!