How to save a local backup of your social media content

Years of photos and videos live in accounts you don't control. Accounts get locked by mistake, posts get taken down retroactively, platforms change owners and rules. None of that is likely on any given day — and all of it happens to somebody every day. The only copy you truly control is the one on your own disk.

Start with the official export

Most platforms offer an official data export somewhere in settings, and it's worth requesting one occasionally: it's the most complete record of your account. It's also slow — often days before the archive is ready — and what arrives is built for completeness, not for browsing: sprawling folders, cryptic filenames, media mixed with metadata dumps. Good as a legal-grade snapshot, bad as a photo library.

Build a browsable backup with the extension

Bulk Social Media Downloader approaches it from the other side: save the media directly, as files you can open, from the pages where you already see them.

• Work through your collections. Open your albums or your profile's media page and start a bulk download — the queue walks the whole collection page by page, resuming if the connection drops.
• Keep it organized on the way in. Folder-structure and filename rules mean the backup lands sorted by collection with names you can search, instead of one flat directory of random strings.
• Top it up with re-runs. Duplicate detection skips files that are already saved, so running the same collection again only fetches what's new. A backup you refresh in minutes is one you'll actually keep refreshing.

The extension processes everything on your device — no account, no cloud relay, no analytics — so the backup exists in exactly one place: yours.

Optional: let the backup report to you

If you keep records elsewhere, the built-in webhook (free) can POST queue events — downloads starting, finishing, failing — to an HTTPS endpoint you control. That's enough to log every backup run into a notes system, a spreadsheet workflow, or a home server without touching the files themselves.

Back up what's yours

A personal backup means your content: what you posted, what you have rights to keep. The platform's terms of service still apply to how you use your account, and other people's work stays theirs.