Amongst the recent features announced for Facebook is the ability to download all of your Facebook account information to your local computer for safe keeping.
The process is very straight forward and you get started by going to your Facebook account page and clicking on the Download Your Information link:
Here is the next page you get which contains some important information about the security of this file your about to download as it contains a lot of personal information:
The next screen is just letting you know that this process could take a while:
After you click the download button in the above dialog box the window updates to let you know that an email will be sent to you once your info is ready for download:
Clicking Okay there brings you back to the original Download Your Information page that has been updated to show that your download is pending:
At this point it is time to wait for the info to be packaged up for you to download. At some point you will get an email that shows you the download is ready and it will contain a direct link to the download (that would be the blacked out part). I requested my download at 1:25 PM and received the email that it was ready at 2:48 PM – 1 hour and 23 minutes.
When you click on that link or visit the Download Your Information page at your Facebook account settings page you will get prompted to enter your password:
Once your correct password is entered you will then get your link to download your information:
The file is a zippped up archive of your information – mine was less than 700KB and the resulting files are an HTML interface to see your Facebook data and browse it.
This is the main index page and you can see the links on the left to the various lists of information that was downloaded from Facebook:
Out of curiosity – how big was your Facebook information download?
