Here, the user link with account ID 216697909 ( ) resolves to the account of the Open Preservation Foundation. For example, here’s the full data from the Tweet in that screenshot. The original, unshortened links are actually stored in the underlying JSON data that are part of the archive (file “tweets.js” in the “data” folder). These links will stop working once Twitter goes down. Perhaps most importantly, if you access your Twitter archive from your web browser by opening the “Your archive.html” file, any clickable hyperlinks you see are shortened t.co links that use Twitter’s link shortener service: Below a (probably incomplete) overview of the most obvious ones. Once downloaded, unzip the file to a folder.Īs several people have pointed out before, the archive data provided by Twitter have a number of shortcomings.Once ready, you can download the archive as one large ZIP file. When I did this two weeks ago, I had to wait over 24 hours various people have told me that currently it take several days. Twitter will issue a notification when the archive is ready:.Click on “Download an archive of your data”, and then simply follow the instructions.While logged in to Twitter, go to your account’s settings.Most importantly, you need to request and download your Twitter data 1. With that said, I can’t give any guarantees here, so keep this in mind while reading what follows! Request and download Twitter archive I’m sharing it here because I think it will be “good enough” for many others as well, or at least provide a reasonable starting point. Ultimately, all I’m describing here is a workflow that, for now, looks “good enough” for my own purposes. Also, an in-depth analysis of the Twitter archive, and a comparison of different tools and approaches are both beyond the scope of this post (besides I don’t have the time for this). For most of the issues I’m addressing here, several alternatives exist, and some may be better than what I’m suggesting here. Disclaimerįirst a little disclaimer: I don’t want to suggest that what follows is the “best”, “proper” or even a “good” way to do this. Since some of these steps may, at first sight, be a little daunting for less tech-savvy readers, I’ve tried to provide step-by-step instructions where possible. In this post I outline the workflow I used to preserve my own Twitter archive, and while doing so I also provide some background information on the shortcomings of the Twitter archive. The good news is, that some excellent tools exist to fix these shortcomings. Some other information (in particular full, unshortened URLs) is included in the archive, but it is not easily accessible from the main HTML interface. on followed accounts and followers) will be lost once Twitter ceases to exist. The result of these shortcomings will be that some information in the archive (e.g. Even though this works well, and the quality of the archive is surpringly good, it does have some shortcomings. Twitter allows you to request and download your personal archive. "Fail whale" by Kuni (ka-92) (license unknown), based on "Lifting a Dreamer" by Yiying Lu.Īs a total collapse of Twitter is becoming more likely every day, many Twitter users have started to archive their personal data from the platform while it still exists.
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