You’ll need to request your Twitter archive before you can download it.
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Your Twitter archive includes all your tweets, replies, followers, Lists, and more.
To download your Twitter archive, head to the Account menu on the website or in the app.
Once you request a copy of your Twitter archive, it might take a few days before you receive it.
With mass layoffs and chaos following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, it might be a good idea to back up your Twitter archive, as no one is quite sure what’s next for the social media app.
If you’re a Twitter power user, you might have thousands of tweets and likes on your account. That can be a lot to sift through just using the website or app.
You can request a full record and archive of all your Twitter activity — all your tweets, photos, followers, and more — by heading to your Account options page on the website or in the app.
It might take a while to download depending on how active your account is, but you’ll be able to download it on any device.
How to request your Twitter archive
1. Head to the Twitter website or open the app and log into your account, if you haven’t already.
2. If you’re on the website, click the More option in the left sidebar. In the mobile app, tap your profile picture in the top-left corner.
3. Tap on Settings and Support and then select Settings and privacy.
Open the “Settings and privacy” menu.
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4. Select Your account, and then Download an archive of your data.
Head through the Settings menu to find the page that lets you archive your data.
Twitter; William Antonelli/Insider
5. You’ll have to re-enter your username and password and a two-factor authentication code. If you don’t have two-factor set up, you’ll be taken to a different page to enable it first.
6. Select Request archive.
Tap or click the “Request archive” option.
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Now you’ll have to wait for Twitter to make your archive. When it’s done, you’ll get a notification on Twitter and an email with a link to it.
Click the highlighted “Download” option.
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How to download and see your Twitter archive
1. Open the email link and click download, or head back to the data menu using the steps we described above. You’ll have to enter your password and a two-factor authentication code again.
Note: Be sure to download your archive within a few days of getting it — after about a week, it’ll expire and you’ll need to request it again.
2. Click Download archive, and then click it again on the next page. You’ll be given a ZIP file to download — it might take a while, depending on your internet connection and how big it is.
Download your Twitter archive.
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3. Once you download the ZIP file, unzip it and open it.
There are a lot of different files and folders inside. The most important are:
The file called Your archive.html is a personalized webpage containing the data that Twitter thinks will be most useful to you. This includes all your original tweets (no retweets or replies), your direct messages, the last year-or-so of Likes, your “Moments” and Lists, and a massive amount of information that advertisers have collected about you. You can open this file in nearly any web browser.The custom HTML page that comes included with a Twitter archive file.
Twitter; William Antonelli/Insider
Inside of the data folder, you’ll find README.txt, a document explaining what every single file in the folder is and what it contains.You’ll also see a folder called tweet_media, which has every photo and video you’ve uploaded to Twitter or retweeted.The highlighted file and folder contain a lot of data.
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Most files inside of the archive are JavaScript files (.js), which you can open in nearly any web browser or word processor. But the easiest way to read your archive is using the HTML file.
Quick tip: You can download and open these folders on your phone, but we recommend looking at them on a computer. It makes browsing through the files and HTML page much easier.