Backing up Facebook and Twitter accounts

For many of us, Facebook and Twitter have become such an integral part of our lives that losing the digital memories posted on these two social media sites can be devastating.
To back up your photos, status updates, wall posts and profile information on Facebook, you can use an online service like Backupify (www.backupify.com).

Another good tool that can help you back up your Facebook data is the desktop program SocialSafe (www.socialsafe.net).

SocialSafe requires Adobe Air, a free program that you can download from get.adobe.com/air. After you have installed SocialSafe, grant it access to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The free version of SocialSafe backs up your Facebook photos, profile information, status updates and friend lists. Once your Facebook data has been archived, you will be able to browse your social history.

If you want to back up your Twitter data, you can upgrade to SocialSafe Pro, which costs US$6.99 (S$8.90). This version also lets you back up your Facebook wall posts and photos posted by your friends in which you have been tagged.

A free Twitter backup option to consider is Tweetbackup (tweetbackup.com), an online tool from the Backupify folks. To use the freebie, you are required to follow @tweetbackup and post a tweet to promote the service. You have to be patient when using this tool as it could take a while to archive your tweets. Also note that because Twitter allows you access to only your latest 3,200 tweets, you may not be able to back up every tweet, especially if you are a compulsive Twitter user.

Tweet Scan Backup (www.tweetscan.com/data.php) is another free service to try. It downloads your last 1,000 tweets and combines them with its database to improve the completeness of your backup. The service trawls the Twittersphere on its own to build up a vast database.

It will then generate an archive that comprises a CSV file and a report presented in the TiddlyWiki format.

Besides tweets, the archive includes data about your replies, friends, followers and direct messages.

For now, restoring data to Twitter from backup data is not possible, due to limitations in the software interface used by programmers to access Twitter data through third-party applications.