I realise that this is now my third post on the subject (I think!), and I don’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. However, numerous tech sites are still running with the story about Anonymous Hackers threatening to bring down Facebook on November 5th – yes, that’s tomorrow. So we thought that people not familiar with SocialSafe might get some peace of mind if they knew how to back up Facebook accounts. Just in case…
Achieving peace of mind is so simple:
- Go to the SocialSafe website
- Look a the ‘Features‘ page to see what can be backed up with which licence
- Once you’ve decided which licence suits your needs best, go to the ‘Buy‘ page, purchase your licence and download the app.
- Install the app, login through your Facebook ID, input your licence and then begin to sync all of your Facebook content.
- Umm… that’s pretty much all there is to it… go ahead and enjoy your social journal app.
Yes, the Standard, Pro and Enterprise versions are not free. ‘Purchase’, ‘Buy’, Pay for’…. People too often seem to lose interest in products and services they see on the web when they stumble across these words. But given the relative cost of the licence compared to what you get, it’s not exactly something you need to consult your financial advisor about. Having the means to safely backup and store your Facebook photos, friends, status updates, wall posts, links, profile information and all comments and tags associated with your content, all for less than the price of a couple of pints? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
This whole story about Facebook being destroyed tomorrow could be nothing more than an empty threat, but then again it could be the real thing. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. But even if this particular episode doesn’t result in any damage, you can be pretty sure that there are viruses, bots, and malevolent forces out there that will try to wrangle control of Facebook further on down the line. Companies backup their work data, why should your social content be any different?
Its actually offered by facebook under the settings
anyone can back up their accounts on facebook to their harddrive…to charge them is a scam
Hi JJbrown,
You’re right, you can download your content from Facebook using their own native ‘Account Backup’ – I’ve mentioned it several times in previous blogs. However, with Facebook’s own backup service, you have to request a copy, and then wait until they’ve emailed you with a download link. Only then you can start to extract your conent. I actually tried this on Friday afternoon, and I didn’t get an email until about 4 hours after I made the request – not great if you were in a hurry.
Another downside to Facebook’s own backup is that once you’ve downloaded everything, it is just left in a folder. What our app brings to the table, is the searchable digital journal aspect. All of your content populates this journal, allowing you to jump back to any date in your Facebook past, and see what people wrote on your wall, which photos you were tagged in, etc for any given day. It also brings down all of the comments and tags associated with your content. In addition to this, you can search across all of your downloaded content (including photo tags) at once – not something easily done with the zipped download you get from Facebook.
Of course, some people will be perfectly happy with the backup that Facebook provide. But there will always be others who want more added value, which is why we have been continually developing our product to go above and beyond the basic ‘download and store’ nature of backups.
We have no intention of ‘scamming’ anyone as you say; in fact we have a Free version of the app. Certain paid versions of the app also include the option to backup multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, which as far as we are aware aren’t services offered for free by either network.
I hope I’ve managed to change your opinion of what we do, but in any case thank you for reading our blog and taking the time to comment.
Best regards,
Andrew