How To Archive Your Social Media (Before It's Obsolete)
A step-by-step guide on how to preserve the most important aspects of your digital life.
In the summer of 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed my grandparents’ house. Dozens of family photo albums, my mother’s baby clothes, her mother’s cast iron skillets, my favorite toys, and a home founded with love and built over decades all washed away.
In 2021, Hurricane Ida destroyed my parents’ house. Eerily, Ida hit on the anniversary of Katrina, 16 years later on August 29. Water crept in as my family slept, and my childhood home flooded more than a foot. My parents woke up in the middle of the night to ankle-deep water, grabbing what they could before fleeing to higher ground. But so much damage was irreparable. It’s impossible to salvage what’s already shattered. It took my family years to rebuild their home. In many ways, they’re still rebuilding. And so am I.
Learning how to preserve what’s important before it’s gone helped me accept such a colossal loss. Living through Hurricane Katrina — experiencing not only the loss of belongings but observing the U.S. government’s failures to protect a population and preserve entire neighborhoods — inspired me to begin and pursue digital archiving as a career. When I learned archiving was an available and necessary field of study, I dove in headfirst. I know what it’s like to lose everything. - Alexis
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Every day, links rot, sites collapse, and apps crash. There is nothing tangible separating us from the disappearance of our most precious memories; countless documents, files, and photos, from personal to professional, could vanish without warning. We’re facing a constant and very real threat of digital decay; the threat of losing every wedding photo, every funny video, every meme we’ve ever made, sent, or screenshotted, every digital diary entry. Eradicated, forever. Our memories are not our own because our media is suspended in an abstract ether of storage, servers, and hardware, shelved — unremarkable and impermanent — in some remote data center we’ll never see. When we can’t access it, does it even exist?
Humans once inherited and preserved objects of immense personal value to themselves, their families, their ancestors. Before photographs, people stored musings and documents inside religious texts, as these books were important enough to pass down through generations. Bibles in the 19th century even included pages at the end of the text for storing family photographs. People kept journals, letters, and photos tucked away in special boxes. Eventually, this became the norm. Families preserved memories in the form of photo albums, scrapbooks, or memory boxes. Most still do, but millennials, along with younger generations, digitized everything. And because we were given no warning and instead sold a promise of everlasting technology advancement and media safekeeping from companies like Google, we now risk losing it all. If we don’t act as archivists of our own existence, will we have anything to show future generations? What will be lost to history? And to ourselves?
We like to act as though we’re still separate from who we are on the Internet: our online persona, our avatar. But that’s no longer true. Modern social etiquette has been built around how we operate online. Most human connection — interaction and communication — takes place on social media. Our medical files exist in the cloud. Students are encouraged to use the Internet. And 55% of U.S. adults regularly use AI. And we take all of it for granted because it feels permanent. But it only feels permanent because it’s habitual and we’ve been made reliant on it. The reality is that none of this is durable. At best, it’s flimsy.
If you don’t know how to preserve media, an enormous part of the you that lives online — your memories, if not legacy — could be erased. Remember MySpace, the platform that in 2019 erased every single file uploaded prior to 2016?
My friend Doug died while we were in college. In the aftermath, through years congested with and punctuated by grief, I’d log into MySpace semi-regularly to click through his photos. Each time I visited his page, I felt teleported into a previous timeline where he was still living. Nothing had been changed or updated. Everything was as he’d left it. Like an ancient insect fossilized in resin, Doug’s page remained preserved. I was naïve in thinking it would stay that way, that the page would stay up at all, but in all of MySpace’s enormity, the alternative seemed impossible.
In 2009, MySpace was almost a decade old. The platform was such a cultural touchstone of the aughts, I thought it infallible. Even with the rise of Facebook, I’d no reason to believe Myspace’s popularity would dwindle, or that all our photos, music, bulletins, or messages would disappear with no prospect of recovery. In the late 2010s, we had yet to experience real Internet decay, which I talk more in depth about in my piece The Internet Is Dying. Is It Worth Saving? While we’re now in an era of obvious web rot, for a long time millennials believed anything uploaded to the Internet would exist in perpetuity, visible to friends, family, and strangers, forever and ever.
I logged into MySpace one day in 2019 to find blank placeholders, with captions still intact, where every image had been. How? How did MySpace, a company valued at $12 billion with over 300 million users in 2007, a platform that had been such a monumental part of the 2000s zeitgeist, erase every single file with no warning? I mistakenly believed the platform had alerted me, and I was at fault for losing access to my account’s Hotmail email. Nope. MySpace deleted everybody’s files by accident. Photos, videos, and music disappeared because of a server migration error. Unlike Google, who are at least warning us they’ll delete our files and accounts, the permanent erasure of all MySpace uploads prior to 2016 was… a mistake. Just human error. Whoops. Poof. Gone.
How was I to know the Internet was not, in fact, “forever?” No one ever suggested I download my uploads and back up my digital files. Even now, the conglomerates safekeeping our memories in the cloud swear by their efforts, but the best technology can’t outrun human stupidity. The truth is, when we play with files, we’re playing with fire. Any misstep, just one error, and it’s all cooked. The Internet is temporary. - Helen
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If you woke up tomorrow and all your online accounts were gone, what would you miss the most? The answer likely encompasses everything, and though the thought of loss is paralyzing, action is possible.
Digital archiving has rapidly emerged as a crucial field for preserving online spaces by collecting and storing various forms of digital files to enable future access. Archivists, trained in preserving original materials and helping people obtain them, are leading the charge in keeping digital materials safe. But how do archivists determine what, of the vastness of the Internet, is important enough to keep?
In the book All This Stuff: Archiving the Artist, archivist Victoria Lane interviews artist Barbara Steveni on how the concept of the archive affected the way Steveni worked. Steveni states an individual should figure out what they would “like their archive to do and for whom.” She asks Lane, “what are we doing with our archives, what are we keeping and what are we not keeping, and what can the planet hold?” Lane answers in a way that begs a larger question: “That’s very interesting; because it’s about how and what society is deciding to keep and what we choose to forget.”
As rights dwindle and waver under administrations marked by disappearing people, funds, entertainment, and websites, there is a necessity to preserve news and current events — invaluable information — for the future.
Our grassroots digital preservation initiative, The Accessible Archivist Coalition, is one such endeavor. Independent researchers, archivists, and passionate volunteers compile news and government information and share it in a publicly accessible digital archive you can visit anytime.
But alongside news and current events, there is incredible value in preserving day-to-day online communications. The minutiae of human life have always been not only the most interesting to historians but also the most revealing of any class, period, or age. In modern, tumultuous, unprecedented times, it’s absolutely necessary we preserve both news and everyday life, and the most effective way to achieve that is through digital archiving. Our day-to-day public online interactions, our posts, our Internet identity — how do we preserve it?
Step by step, we’re going to teach you how to archive your media.
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First, let’s talk about how to download your data.
Files created on your computer are referred to as “born digital” media, whereas files uploaded to your computer have been digitized. This process will show you how to archive media that was born digitally.
This blog post illustrates how to request your data from each social media platform and download it to your device, The Digital Preservation Coalition has a quick how-to guide on best practices from digital archivists (I know it’s from 2019 but the practices mentioned are still relevant and work).
When the first threat of a TikTok ban began looming over us in January 2025, I (Alexis) scoured the Internet for ways to download all my videos in bulk in case the app were to go dark. There were a few resources I found to be particularly helpful in my quest, the most impactful by far being the r/DataHoarder subreddit.
I found lists of tools to help me bulk-download all my posts on Tiktok and save all my Twitter media, as well as tips on how to download all my Instagram videos and photos.
The consensus from the Data Hoarders is that most people find success with WFDownloader for general-purpose bulk downloads from all social media platforms and the MyFavTT browser extension for mass-downloading TikToks. (I personally used MyFavTT to preserve my own TikToks and consider it the easiest, most efficient way to do so. -A)
While there are nearly unlimited threads on how to archive your social media on the Data Hoarders subreddit, plenty of fun and provocative conversations are also taking place, like the process of preserving almost-lost and even censored media before it’s gone forever.
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So what do I do with all this stuff?
First, it’s time to create an organizational system (this sounds more daunting than it actually is). Pick a consistent title format that will allow you to instantly know what you’re looking at. For example, you can name a folder “Twitter Data 10-1-2025,” which gives you the subject and date you downloaded the data for quick reference. Follow the naming convention you’ve created by matching the format of your other files to the one you’ve created, e.g. “Instagram Videos 10-2-2025” or “TikToks 10-3-2025.” The Purdue University Library has a great reference article on file naming conventions that can help you visualize the best way to organize data.
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My files are organized. Now what?
When you’re ready to invest in a hard drive, the Data Hoarders have got you! Wirecutter also published their annual list of the best hard drives of 2025. Though which drives are most reliable is a contentious topic online, the hard drives both sources recommend are the same ones my archival colleagues and I use daily:
Seagate Expansion external hard drives, $80 for 2TB, $130 for 5TB
Seagate Hard Drive, Best Buy WD EasyStore external hard drives, $70 for 1TB, up to $160 for 6TB.
WD Hard Drive, Best Buy
They’re not cheap, but hard drives can often be found on sale, and either way, they’re worth the investment. Quality drives are invaluable for keeping files safe. Plus, they’ll last you a long time… but not forever, unless you maintain them! It’s imperative to plug your hard drive in every 6 months to ensure it hasn’t corrupted. It’s also recommended to keep multiple backups (the official recommendation is 3), with one on a local disc, like your computer, and one on an external disc, like the hard drives mentioned. Nothing lasts forever. Technology ages, often quickly. If you want to archive your digital media, it’s important to note that you may have to replace the archive (i.e. swap out your hard drives) every 6-7 years.
The dilemma of digital and physical media is that they’re both susceptible to destruction in different ways. Physical media could tear, burn, unravel, break. But digital media corrupts, especially when it’s encoded onto physical systems like hard drives. Extreme temperatures and changes in humidity must be avoided to protect storage. The University of Michigan’s Library Guide suggests avoiding the aforementioned as well as direct light, moisture, dust, dirt, mold, and pests. Also, apparently, drives and magnets do not mix.
To further drive home what a worthwhile investment an external hard drive is, I have a 1TB Seagate drive I’ve downloaded over 50,000+ Tiktoks onto. It’s not even halfway full. The average person’s tweets, Instagram posts, Tiktoks, Pinterest pins, etc. don’t take up much space on the storage-end, which will allow you to keep building your archive. More information detailing the 5 steps of archiving — select, gather, organize, backup, and maintain — can be found in the above library guide.
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How do I get my data onto the hard drive?
When you download your data, it saves to your computer as compressed zip files. You can unzip the files to ensure the items were saved correctly and without errors. To save space on your drive, zip them back up when you’re finished. Right-click (or Ctrl-click on Mac) to “Compress” on Mac or right-click and hover over Send To for a compressed folder option on Windows.
Next, open your file explorer and drag and drop the files onto the external drive. Now, you have your very own archive.
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Is this a waste of time?
No! Outside of safekeeping your own memories for your kids or grandkids, archiving as a concept is bound to the study of history. And the study of history is more about the future than the past. The future may look bleak, but we mustn’t cave to doomerism. Humans have existed for approximately 300,000 years; the future has looked bleak for many human beings, many, many times. Archivists work on a foundation of hope. Collectively, it’s all we have.
Some think of social media as frivolous, or worse, “unserious.” But it’s evidence of humanity. It is proof of emotion and impulse and interpersonal relationships. There’s the anecdote of the “World’s Oldest Complaint”, the Mesopotamian complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir, a 4000-year-old bronze-age tablet detailing a formal, and rather heated, complaint about the poor grade of copper a man named Nanni received from a trader. It’s evidence that we as humans have always been, well, human. Though once trivial, maybe even commonplace in its time, the tablet remains archaeological evidence that the human spirit — and our cynicism, evident in this very issue of technology and archiving — perseveres.
Certainly, Nanni the copper-complainer was not thinking of future generations reading his grievance when he etched it. Had he, he wouldn’t have created it at all, let alone sent it. But with the resources we have now, archiving doesn’t have to be accidental. We have a say in what could be preserved for people 4000 years from now. Now, we can try to save information on purpose, and perhaps it’s lucky for future human beings that we’ve evolved into oversharers.
To answer Lane’s question of “what the planet can hold,” regarding preservation for the future, we’ll never know. We don’t know what the future will look like, what our fast-changing world and environment will become, or what people centuries from now will think or feel or do. But we have enough evidence of the past to know they’ll still be human, with all inherent clumsiness and selfishness and joy and wonder intact, so it’s a safe bet people will find whatever we leave behind both fascinating and essential to education and life, just like us. So, what are you deciding to keep for both yourself and society? And maybe most importantly, what are you choosing to forget?
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