How To Backup Your Twitter Archive
With the Twitter fail whale popping up all the time, you never know when something tragic might happen. No one want to lose all of their Twitter tweets, followers, or anything else for that matter. That’s why it’s a good idea to backup your Twitter archive on a regular basis in case of a Twitter mishap. As we all know, there has been numerous times in the past where users have lost followers, tweets, and DMs. Fortunately, you can make sure this doesn’t happen to you by using one of the following methods to backup your Twitter archive.
Tweetake
- Enter your Twitter username and password.
- Select what you’d like to backup (followers, favorites, DMs, friends, tweets, or everything).
- Click the “Get ‘em!” button.
- Choose where you’d like to save the file on your computer.
- Open the file an you will get an Excel document that looks similar to the screenshot below.
TweetBackup
- Signup using Twitter oAuth which will let TweetBackup access your Twitter account.
- You will then need to then enter your email address.
- Once you’re logged in, you can add as many “profiles” (aka accounts) as you like.
- You can then export your backup file, view your archived posts, restore a profile and change your settings via the different tabs.
- Since TweetBackup is fairly new, a few features are not yet supported but will be in the near future.
TwitterBackup
- Download and open the Java application.
- Once the window pops up, enter your Twitter username and password.
- In the ‘file name’ field you’ll need to enter the name that you’d like your file to be saved as. If you are just updating a pre-existing file then just enter the current file name.
Note: Make sure you have a .xml extension on the file name. - Enter a proxy if necessary – only if you connect to the Internet through a proxy.
- If you have a lot of tweets to backup, it will take a little while since the program takes 1-minute breaks between each page of tweets that you have (It took 20 minutes for me.).
FriendBackup
- Click on the launch button.
Note: You will need Java 6 to run this program. - Save and open the file then wait for it to download.
- After running the file, a small window will open up.
- Click on the backup tab and enter your Twitter username and password.
- Then you can select what you’d like to backup (following, followers, DMs, tweets, and/or favorites).
- You can also view your stats and export your backup file.
Twitter XML
TweetCrunch also has a handy method for backing up your Twitter friends and followers in three simple steps. You simple save an XML file from your browser and then open it in Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet software. If you’re looking for the quickest method to backup your Twitter archive, this is probably it. Below you can see how the table appears in Excel.
TwitterSafe
If you’re looking for a newer method, there’s also TwitterSafe beta that is currently “down for maintenance” and has been for the past week. I’m not sure when they’ll be back online but it might be worth a try. Keep an eye for them.
Which method do you prefer or have used in the past? Please let us know in the comments.
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How would you retrieve the backup if your profile crashes?
TweetBackup actually has that option but it is not available yet. According to their website it will be “just a few more weeks”.
Even though there are many options, archiving twitter feeds still seems limited to me. I’m currently using Twistory to import my feed into iCal, from which I can search through my tweets or backup the whole timeline. I’m satisified so far, but always looking at alternatives.
That’s the same question I have. Which one of these has the simplest procedure to restore my Twitter profile from the backup?
I would say TweetBackup. We just have to wait a few more weeks for them to enable the feature.
Which of these methods are the easiest to use?
Using the Twitter XML was easiest and quickest for me. There’s really only 2 steps.
I’m using Sparrow (a service I developed), it’s similar to Tweetbackup in that it continually backs up the twitter posts after you set it up. The tweet history can then be searched, exported as one big RSS file, split into daily/weekly/monthly summaries or automatically mailed somewhere (if you don’t trust Twitter or Sparrw to be online when you want to access the archive). There’s no option for restoring the tweets ATM (but IIRC no service actually has that working right now).
The Sparrw service is still early in development, and I’m hoping to add more features related to examining/reusing tweet history, if you guys want to check it out and have comments on what/how it should be improved, I’m listening
Nice post,
The first one is awesome one and really enjoyed using it…
seriously your meaningless ego posts are that important that you are afraid you might lose them?
I’m with Trolomatic on this one. If we’re going to have tweet backup databases we better roll out status update savers for facebook as well. Also, bring a recorder around with you and have it record everything you ever say so you’ve got a backup.
Some people like the ability to back up their favorites. I recently had a follower lose all her favorites. There were tons of links to information she wanted to keep for future reference.
I currently use TweetBackup, but the service that will win this category is the one that manages to back up tweets that have already expired off your pages. They’re still in the system with unique identifiers, they’re just hard to find.
I just tried Tweetake and that’s all I need. Works great. Now I can keep track of all my tweets and Url’s that people have sent me.
Ecosnob
P.S.- Tweeting this page!
Nice list, “The Archivist” is another good tool for this.
I use tweetake, but you need to do it every 900 tweets or so (not a bad habit to get into anyway) as it only grabs your last 1,000.
I released Twitter Back, a command line app written in Ruby which backs up and restores your friend list.
I just use loudtwitter to ship them to my wordpress blog (and not to livejournal because those people get so hateful about it)
I am more interested in saving hashtag archives. My org gets input from various satellite personnel using Twitter, but we’d like to save those exchanges with people using our hashtags. Is there a program that does that?
Nice post, Charnita. Thank you. Used Tweetake and loved the simplicity. But it only backs up every 1000. Anything out there that lets you back up all your tweets? From the very first. That said, any idea how far back Twitter saves your tweets?
We are another option for backing up Tweets to your email (Gmail and Google Apps, as well as IMAP), we just opened up in beta. Check us out! http://www.tweets2mail.com.
Cheers,
Tom
it’s a nice post.. thanks for the info
You could also use http://www.printyourtwitter.com and save the page with your tweets to your harddisk or print your tweets to pdf.
We’ve recently launched http://tweetsaver.com with features like full search, tagging and sharing of your tweets.
Feel free to check us out!
It is a good article.I just need this backup software.Thanks for your sharing.
It is useful.If we’re going to have tweet backup databases we better roll out status update savers for facebook as well. Also, bring a recorder around with you and have it record everything you ever say so you’ve got a backup.
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It is a good article.I just need this backup software.Thanks for your sharing.
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This is the first time I have actually heard of this. So, thank you.