How to Export Facebook Posts

Need a copy of everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook? Whether you’re creating a personal backup, analyzing your content strategy, or building a portfolio of your work, exporting your Facebook posts is a straightforward process. This guide will walk you through the official methods for downloading your entire history and show you a few simpler tricks for saving individual posts.

Why Export Your Facebook Posts Anyway?

Before getting into the how-to, it’s helpful to know why you might want to do this. For social media marketers, brand managers, and creators, exporting your post data isn't just about saving memories, it’s a strategic move. Here are a few common reasons:

• Digital Archiving: Social media platforms can change their rules, experience outages, or sunset features. Having a personal backup of your content is a good safety net. If you ever decide to delete your account or page, you'll still have a record of everything you created.
• Content Analysis: While Facebook's own analytics are useful, having your raw data in a downloadable format (like JSON or HTML) allows for deeper, custom analysis. You can sort, filter, and track performance over long periods in a spreadsheet to identify your best-performing content, posting times, and engagement patterns in ways the native tools don't always allow.
• Repurposing Content: Your best-performing posts shouldn't just live on Facebook. Exporting your data makes it simple to find your greatest hits - the posts that got the most shares, comments, and reactions - so you can repurpose them for other platforms like your blog, LinkedIn, or an email newsletter.
• Building a Portfolio: If you're a freelance social media manager or content creator, an export of your most successful posts serves as a powerful portfolio to show potential clients. You can showcase high-engagement content, creative campaigns, and your ability to connect with an audience.
• Legal or Compliance Reasons: In some industries, keeping a record of all business communications, including social media posts, is a requirement. An export provides a timestamped, accessible archive.

The Official Method: Step-by-Step with Facebook’s ‘Download Your Information’ Tool

Facebook has a built-in tool that lets you request and download a comprehensive file of all your information, including your posts. This is the most thorough way to get everything in one go. It might sound technical, but it’s just a matter of clicking a few buttons. The main thing to remember is that this process can take some time - from a few hours to a few days - because Facebook has to gather all your data before making the file available.

Here’s how to do it on a desktop computer:

1. Get to the Right Settings Page

First, you need to navigate to the correct section within your Facebook settings. It’s slightly buried, but easy to find once you know where to look.

1. Click your profile picture thumbnail in the top-right corner of Facebook.
2. From the dropdown menu, select Settings & Privacy, and then click Settings.
3. In the left-hand sidebar, navigate to Your Facebook Information. In the new Meta Accounts Center view, this might be under Privacy Center or by going to Accounts Center > Your information and permissions > Download your information.
4. You'll see an option that says Download your information. Click View or Download next to it.

2. Customize Your Data Request

You’re now on the page where you can tell Facebook exactly what you want to download. The key here is to deselect everything you don't need to make the export faster and the final file smaller and more manageable.

Choose Your Format, Quality, and Date Range

Before choosing the content, you’ll have a few options at the top:

• Format: You get two choices: HTML and JSON.
  • Choose HTML if you just want to browse your data easily. Facebook organizes it into folders with web pages that look like a simplified version of Facebook, making it easy to read your posts and see your photos. It's the best option for most people.
  • Choose JSON if you plan to import your data into another application or analyze it in a spreadsheet. This format is machine-readable and great for developers or data analysts, but looks like a wall of code to the average person.
• Media quality: You can choose from High, Medium, or Low. If you want to keep your images and videos in their best possible resolution, select High. If you just care about the text and want a faster download, choose Low.
• Date range: The default is All time, but you can select a specific date range if you only need posts from a particular campaign or quarter.

Select What Information to Download

Next, you’ll see a long list of checkboxes for every type of data Facebook stores about you. By default, everything is selected.

1. First, click the Deselect All link at the top of the list.
2. Now, scroll down the list and find Posts. Check the box next to it. This tells Facebook to only gather your posts, statuses, photos, and videos you've shared.
3. If you also manage a Facebook Page and want its content, make sure you're properly selecting your 'profile' at the top of the Accounts Center page to download Page data instead of your personal profile data. Pages' posts are included in this 'Posts' category.
4. Once you’ve selected just 'Posts', scroll all the way to the bottom and click the Request a download button.

3. Wait for Your File and Download It

After you request the download, Facebook will start packaging your data. You’ll see a “Pending” status in the Available files tab. When it’s ready, Facebook will send you a notification (and likely an email) to let you know.

Once you get the notification:

1. Return to the Download your information page and go to the Available files tab.
2. You'll see your file with a Download button next to it. Before you can download it, you'll need to enter your Facebook password again for security.
3. Your file will download as a compressed ZIP file. Once downloaded, you'll need to unzip it to see the contents.

What To Do With Your Exported Facebook Data

You’ve downloaded the ZIP file and unzipped it. Now what? Your next steps depend on the format you chose.

If You Chose HTML Format

Your unzipped folder will contain several subfolders. The one you care most about is called posts. Inside it, you’ll likely find a file named your_posts_1.html (and maybe your_posts_2.html if you have a lot of content). Just double-click this file to open it in your web browser. It will look like a basic, offline webpage showing a timeline of your posts, complete with text, dates, and links to the media (which will be in other folders).

This format is perfect for:

• Reading through your old posts comfortably.
• Grabbing text to copy and paste elsewhere.
• Finding specific high-performing posts to use as examples in a portfolio.

If You Chose JSON Format

Opening a JSON file directly might look intimidating - it's just a wall of text and brackets. This format isn’t meant to be read by humans, but by machines.

Here’s how you can make it useful:

You can convert your JSON file to a CSV file (which opens in any spreadsheet program like Excel or Google Sheets) using a free online tool. Just search for a "JSON to CSV converter," upload your posts.json file, and it will generate a spreadsheet for you.

Once you have your posts in a spreadsheet, you can:

• Sort your posts by date to see your post history.
• Analyze the text of your posts for common themes or keywords.
• If the data includes engagement metrics, you could sort by likes or comments to quickly find your most popular content. (Note: Facebook's standard export is often limited and may not include detailed engagement metrics like likes and shares).

The Quick Method: Saving Individual Posts

Don't need a full archive? If you just need to save one or two specific posts, the full download process is overkill. Here are a few simpler ways to grab what you need in seconds.

1. Take a Screenshot

The simplest method of all. If you just need a visual record of a post - text, image, and initial engagement (likes, comments, etc.) included - a quick screenshot is often all you need. It’s perfect for dropping into a presentation, report, or portfolio.

2. Copy the Post Permalink

Every Facebook post has a unique URL. Simply click the date/timestamp of the post (e.g., "5 hours ago" or "October 20"). This will open the post on its own page, and you can copy the URL from your browser's address bar. This is great for sharing a link to a specific post with a client or team member.

3. Copy and Paste the Text

Old but gold. If you just need the caption or the text from a post to repurpose, you can just highlight the text, right-click, and copy it. This works well for moving written content into a document, your notes app, or repurposing it for another platform.

Final Thoughts

Exporting your Facebook posts gives you a powerful way to back up, analyze, and repurpose the content you’ve worked hard to create. Using Facebook's "Download Your Information" tool is the best method for a complete archive, while simple tricks like taking a screenshot are perfect for saving a few posts on the fly.

Archiving tells you what worked in the past, but the real goal is to create better content for the future. After wrestling with clunky tools ourselves, we built Postbase to make that easier. Instead of exporting data to a separate spreadsheet for analysis, our platform gives you one clean analytics dashboard to see performance across all your channels in real-time. This saves you the headache of manual data pulls and helps you focus on what really matters: planning and creating content your audience loves.