The Library of Congress has my cheese sandwich
December 30, 2011 11:53 AM

I'd like all my past, present and future Twitter activity to get saved to a text (csv or xml or whatever) file on Dropbox. I'd like to think about this as little as possible. What's my best bet?

I don't really trust Twitter to keep all my activity online for the rest of eternity. Dropbox is great because it sits on the actual filesystems of multiple computers I keep in multiple locations. I've done one-off dumps of twitter activity in the past, but never keep it up.

I have Linux or OSX systems to run this on. I am very comfortable with the basics of unix cron, output redirection, etc.

I would just like something that runs in the background, recovers from downtime gracefully, and spits out plain text. If I have to use something different to build an archive to present day, I can live with that.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed to Technology (6 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
I'm sure someone will be along with something you can run on your own systems, but until then you might want to look at ifttt.com. I have it saving my Twitter activity into an Evernote document, but it does integrate with Dropbox, so I would imagine you could have it easily set up to save to a document in your Dropbox instead.
posted by Stacey at 12:14 PM on December 30, 2011


Iffft.com can do exactly this for you (although it might save each tweet individually). I love that site.
posted by ukdanae at 12:18 PM on December 30, 2011


You can also try backupify.com. I don't think it integrates with Dropbox but it will backup your Twitter account.
posted by mingshan at 12:30 PM on December 30, 2011


Jotunheim for iOS saves all your social media postings and lets you export them as plain text. I'm pretty sure it was made by a mefite, but I don't remember who.
posted by desjardins at 12:57 PM on December 30, 2011


ThinkUp is designed to do this. And a lot more, so it may not meet your simplicity criteria. I also just stumbled into TwitterBackup, a Java program, no idea if it works.

Be aware that no matter what you do, Twitter will only let you access your past 3200 tweets.
posted by Nelson at 1:15 PM on December 30, 2011


One more option is Google Spreadsheets - there's a 'script' available from the script library that scrapes twitter for all sorts of uselful info; it should be simple to export that as a csv.
posted by dirm at 8:34 PM on December 30, 2011


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