How to download your Twitter archive to your computer

Martin Brinkmann
Feb 15, 2013
Updated • Jan 4, 2018
Companies, Internet, Twitter
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Twitter users up until now had only one option at their disposal to access past messages that they have posted on the social messaging site: to browse the tweets manually on the site itself. This was not really practicable at all and while search may have helped find messages of interest, a missing backup or export feature to local computer systems was something that many Twitter users missed dearly as they could make good use of it.

If you open the Twitter settings right now you may notice a new entry at the very bottom of the account settings page. The request your archive button is new and enables you to create an archive containing all of your messages on Twitter.

How it works? Simply click on the request your archive button and wait until you receive a message from Twitter send to your email account that contains the download link. It should not take too long, a couple of minutes tops unless you have posted hundreds of thousands of messages on the site.

twitter download message archive screenshot

The email's subject is "Your Twitter download is ready" and contains a link that you need to click on, or copy and paste, to get to the page where you can download your Twitter archive.

twitter archive download screenshot

A click on the download button saves a tweet.zip file with all of your messages to the local system. From here it is just a matter of unpacking the archive to your system to load the index.html file it contains in its root folder in a web browser of choice.

all twitter messages screenshot

The archive lists tweets of the selected month on the left, and an overview of the account's Twitter history on the right. Here you can jump to specific months of interest, or use the search on top to find specific tweets in the archive.

The feature is currently being rolled out. If you do not use an English language interface and do not see the button, try switching to English for a moment as the button should become visible in the settings afterwards.

Note that the archive may contain sensitive information so make sure you protect it properly.

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Comments

  1. Jeremy said on February 17, 2013 at 8:44 pm
    Reply

    Alternatively, setup an ‘If This Then That’ (https://ifttt.com/) push, from Twitter to Dropbox or Google Drive or really, anywhere else.

  2. Marlon Orozco Baños said on February 15, 2013 at 4:47 pm
    Reply

    I can’t seet. Maybe its rolling out slowly. I have a couple of questions, tho. Does it show you statistics? And, if your tweets were a reply, does it shows the original twet? What about retweets?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on February 15, 2013 at 4:52 pm
      Reply

      I do not really use Twitter regularly. From what I can tell, you can see the tweets you made per month by hovering over the graphs on the right. Can’t say anything about the remaining questions.

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