We’ve been talking about whether or not you can save your Facebook messages this week. It’s not actually necessary to save them because they never go away unless, though it can sometimes be a pain to search years of messages. The only exception being that someone can delete their end of a conversation.
However, should you get locked out of or close your Facebook account, your messages would be gone. You can download copies of all of your messages from Facebook, though.
That can oftentimes be a lot of data, but it’s not a complicated process. Let’s see how it’s done. The easiest way is to open Facebook in a browser and click your profile picture in the upper right. Choose Settings & Privacy.
Then choose Settings.
In the left column, choose See more in Accounts Center.
Choose Your information and permissions.
Select Download your information.
Request a download.
You can download of your information or just select information.
Here, I’m only selecting Messages.
You can also select a date range if you only want certain messages or perhaps to back up recent messages.
Then click on Request Download.
You’ll see a message that a copy of your data is being created. You’ll be notified when the copy is ready and you can then download it.
Click on the download button and it will be downloaded to your Downloads folder.
The files will be zipped, so you’ll need to extract them before opening. Once extracted, your messages will display in the folder by conversation.
