How to download a backup copy of your tweets [Tip]

Have you ever thought of downloading a backup copy of your tweets? If you haven’t, then you better start doing so. After all, having a backup copy can help you trace the tweets that you’ve posted on a particular time or date. It can also help you restore your tweets just in case something bad happens to your Twitter account (ex. hacked, removed, banned, etc.).

So without further ado, here are the steps on how to download a backup copy of your tweets on Twitter:

On your web browser, log in to your Twitter account using your username and password
Once you’re logged in, click the gear button next to direct messages.
Click “Settings” on the drop-down menu and then on the “Account” tab, scroll down to the bottom portion of page until you find the section for “Your Twitter Archive”.

Click the button for “Request your archive”. Processing your archive can take a while. Be patient.
Check the email address that you’ve linked to your Twitter account. Twitter will send you the download link. Just click on the download link to download the backup copy of your tweets. The file will be saved to your computer as .zip. You can just unzip it to view the CSV and HTML copy of your tweets.

The good thing about this method is that it can give you the full list of your tweets – starting from your very first tweet.

Alternate method – use a third-party web app

If you want to gain more control over the type of tweets that you can download from your account, you can use a free web app such as TweetDownload. All you need to do is load the web app’s homepage on your browser and then specify the type of information that you wish to acquire.

With this web app, you can download the following data from your Twitter account:

Your last 3200 tweets (up to 1600 tweets for fast mode)
Your tweets with replies and mentions
Your direct messages
Your followers and the people you follow

After which, just log in to the web app using your Twitter account and wait a bit while it fetches the data from your account. Once done, it will give you list of your tweets, direct messages, etc.