 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rossell here for today's video. I'm going to be showing quickly how you can take a backup of your Twitter data, what you might want to know and what you're going to find inside. More importantly, when you do that, because clearly a backup is only as good as the data you get. Now, technically speaking, because I have friends in the backup community and I do consider myself something of a backup geek. There is a big difference between backup and archive. And what we're doing really here is pulling out an archive or pulling out a snapshot of our user data at a certain point in time. Now, the reason that I think this is important to do is really for any SaaS platform, any cloud hosted platform you're using, whether that's a social network like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, even Google, Microsoft, any cloud that you are creating data on, you're really putting yourself in a kind of vulnerable position from a sort of data management perspective. Right? Now, the reason I say that was Twitter is obviously the moment Twitter is making crazy headlines with the whole Elon Musk stuff and Elon Musk voting himself out of Twitter CEO. Apparently, that's actually going to happen. But it's been crazy volatile recently. We're seeing Twitter announced these kind of snap policy shifts that, you know, you won't be allowed on to continue posting on Twitter if your primary purpose of using it is to promote content and other social networks. And this really just goes to show that when you are using a service like Twitter or any SaaS, you are not the owner of that castle. And the owner of that digital castle can move the goalpost on you very quickly. And that's why my recommendation personally would be to periodically back up your data on any SaaS platform, whether we're talking about Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, whether you're a business, whether you're a, you know, private person, I would do it. So let's just quickly have a look at the backup functionality. And just one more sort of pre word of preamble here. The backup functionalities, if you do this regularly and you try to back up your own data wherever it is across the web, you will discover that they're the only thing in common between the backup functionalities of Twitter. Asana, you know, you name your cloud tool is that there is, there are very little commonalities. Everyone does it a little bit differently. And that's why I recommend the first time you do a backup process, go into your backup archive and see what you actually got. Because you're not going to know it's better to know at the start than if you ever do find yourself suspended from Twitter or Asana or whatever platform, whatever SaaS platform you want, it's better to discover first than when it's too late to see what the platform actually gave you. So let's take a quick look in Twitter here. And this is basically it. If you play around in the settings, you'll find this page fairly quickly. Your account Twitter data and then you click on download archive. And what this is going to do is package up an archive. And this takes a while. So I've seen people saying, you know, I never got the archive. It does take like 24 hours and you'll see why. Because if you if you're an active Twitter user, it's grabbing all your data, it's packaging up all the images you've tweeted, everything you've tweeted, pulling that out of Twitter's own databases. So it does take a little bit. So just remember, this isn't an instant process. And after you request the archive, it's going to take a little bit. So anyway, you get an email when this process is complete and you download the archive. Now, what I'm going to do is show you guys my archive that I just exported myself from Twitter and give a sort of whistle stop tour what's inside. Now, all I've done here is unzip this Twitter archive. Otherwise, it's pretty much untampered. So just to show you what you're going to get, you're going to get a bunch of .js files, right? JavaScript files, and you're going to get a few folders. And I'll show you where the kind of goodies are. There's one HTML file, which is kind of going to help you navigate it. You can open that in a web browser or you can just pull through these folders. In assets, there is very little. I'm not quite sure exactly what this stuff is. I don't think it's account specific. You know, you've got fonts, you've got some JS files. I really don't know exactly what this is. So I hope no personal info was revealed here. Data is where you want to where you want to go to actually get to your export process and you're going to get a few. Now, the folder structure is pretty good. It's pretty self-explanatory. You can see here, deleted tweets media, right? And I'm just going to make this a bit easier for you guys to see. I remember this is actually from only a few days ago, I was tweeting my home networking setup and I kept making tweaks to the labeling here. So, so just just to show you. And again, I think this kind of really emphasizes when you're creating data on the internet, the internet never forgets. Even when you delete a tweet, as you can see here, right? Those images are being very much retained on Twitter servers and because you can access them yourself. So I've actually only got six images in my deleted tweets folder. And again, you can just kind of play around with it like this and you'll kind of figure out what the various folders are. Here's the big one tweets media and it is four hundred. So my export came to about four hundred and fifty gigs. And if you check a look in here, this is going to be like everything you have tweeted, right? So over the years, I've tweeted like this was a Prosecco tour, a photo of my desk, you know, some some stuff about Corona and Internet speed test, a video. So basically everything I'm just going to pull up the video here. I have no recollection of tweeting this photo of this video. I think that's a retweet. This is for sure not my video. I don't own a drone. So, you know, it looks like they actually do a pretty thorough job of like the stuff you retweet even, you know, they're going to package that up. And of course, if you're a bit more tech savvy, you could filter this folder according to the file type so you could put your MP4 video files into one folder and the rest into another. Now, your tweets themselves, like who you followed, who you've blocked, if you've blocked anyone, all this stuff is here. It's really actually quite thorough. Your phone number is there. I'm going to try to find my tweets. Tweets.js looks like the one I want. I'm going to just open this up on a text editor here. And as you can see, yeah, this is like I sent this tweet a few days ago, one of the biggest threats for creators and their productivity, letting toxic negative people derail those who don't get it, derail what you love doing. So you can see this is really I'm not going to continue with the rest of it. So basically, if you are a Twitter user and an active Twitter user, I really recommend now, specifically at this point in history, going through this export process, backing up your tweets. You're going to get a nice little package from Twitter. And if you really want to join the, you know, international fraternity and sorority of backup enthusiasts, I actually do totally recommend doing this, like every you don't have to be crazy about it. Do it like once a month on Twitter, LinkedIn, all the kind of cloud platforms you use, and they'll just put those on, you know, an M disc or an NAS or whatever. And it'll just give you peace of mind that if you ever get locked out of one of these SaaS services, your data will not disappear into a black hole. So I hope this was useful. If you have other sort of hacks or methodologies for backing up your Twitter data, feel free to leave me a comment here on YouTube. I always love reading them. And thank you guys very much for watching and keep your Twitter data safe. And I hope that good and more stable things are to come to Twitter because it's really, really a good platform. Thank you guys for watching.