Every so often, people ask us how to merge two or more Facebook accounts together. We tell them not to get their hopes up. The truth is, it's not possible to automatically merge Facebook accounts. However, there is a workaround.
While Facebook doesn't offer a way to auto-merge all of your friends, photos, status updates, check-ins, or other information, you can manually merge parts of your accounts. All it takes is a little preparation and patience. Unfortunately, you won't be able to migrate or re-create all of your data.
Step 1: Bulk Download Your Facebook Data
As a first step, we recommend you download your Facebook data in bulk. This procedure can take some time and the archive will serve as a minimal backup should you decide to deactivate or delete your account. Unfortunately, it won't be of great help in restoring any data, though.
Briefly, go to Settings and Security, select Your Facebook Information from the left sidebar, and click View next to where it says Download Your Information.
This will lead you to a page where you can download your information and get a copy of what you have shared on Facebook. To download all of your data, select All of my data from the Date Range option, choose a download Format, select Media Quality, and click Create File.
This is where you will need patience. Depending on how big your main and expanded archives are and how many other archives are in the queue, this can take some time. And with that, we mean a couple of hours.
Note that you must download all offered archives if you want to receive a full backup of your account.
Although your own photos are supposed to be included in the archive, you should still download your Facebook photos and videos separately. Not only is this procedure another backup, it is also a lot faster and might provide you with more options.
Step 2: Restore Your Friends
As mentioned above, you won't be able to restore or migrate all of your data and that includes your friends. You'll need to manually add friends to your new account. Unfortunately, it is not possible to export your Facebook friends to a third-party account and then re-import them to a new Facebook account.
However, you can import contacts from your smartphone. So if you have the contact details of most of your friends on accounts outside of Facebook, you can take a small shortcut:
- Open the Facebook app for Android or iOS.
- Tap the three horizontal lines in the top-right corner, head to Settings > Media and Contacts, and enable Continuous Contacts Upload.
That will continuously upload contacts from your phone to Facebook and help you find your lost friends.
Step 3: Restore Your Facebook Account Data
Here comes the big letdown. There is no way to upload or otherwise import your archive to restore or transfer data from your old Facebook account to your new one. Whatever you want to restore, you have to do it (semi-)manually. Right now, the archive merely serves as a personal backup. Nothing more.
So what are your options? You can re-add your old friends as shown above, re-upload photos you downloaded from your old account, re-tag your friends in your photos, re-join groups you were a member of, re-add Facebook apps, manually re-do all of your personal settings, including general account and privacy settings.
We wish we had better news, but as previously mentioned, you cannot auto-merge two Facebook accounts or restore your data, so you're essentially starting from scratch.
What You Will Lose
You will lose a lot.
Your entire Timeline and News Feed history will be gone, including posts or photos you were tagged in, places you checked into, all the Likes you issued or received, or groups you were a member of, all your account and privacy settings, and any other records you accumulated over time.
Your photos and friends are really all you can take with you; everything else has to be re-created manually.
Step 4: Deactivate or Close Your Old Facebook Account
If you decide to deactivate or close your old Facebook account, be sure to add your new account as an admin to any Groups or Pages you manage. Otherwise, you will lose access to them.
Once you have taken care of admin roles, have downloaded all of your data, and are sure you want to completely remove your account, log into the Facebook account you want to close, and visit the Delete Account page to kick off the process.
We have previously explained how to delete your Facebook account if you need additional help doing so.
The Only Way to Merge Facebook Accounts
In conclusion, Facebook allows you to download an archive of your account. However, there is no matching system in place to restore your data, should the account get compromised. Which is disappointing.
Facebook never intended to provide a restore feature. Instead, the social network was legally forced to offer a way for users to download their data. As a result, users are left with nothing but half-baked solutions or awkward workarounds, should they desire to merge two accounts.
Perhaps it's time to consider bidding goodbye to Facebook forever?