Prying my stuff out of Facebook

October 24, 2012 9:35 AM

I'm in the process of emptying out my Facebook account. I appreciate any tips on this, but there's a couple of things I'd like to know in particular.

1. How long can I expect to wait to receive my archived data from Facebook? I asked for it via their form two weeks ago, and then again one week ago and still haven't gotten anything.

2. I've searched for a way to just delete all the data from the account without deleting the account itself, and it seems that that's not possible. So, I think the next best thing is a user script that just keeps on clicking delete on all of the content. Can you recommend one?

posted by ignignokt to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

When I've downloaded my content from Facebook I got the notification that it was ready within a couple of hours.
posted by COD at 9:49 AM on October 24, 2012

Me too.
posted by grouse at 9:52 AM on October 24, 2012

The "download archive" may be totally broken right now. I mad to make a bug report and keep trying for about a week before I got an answer that actually worked.
posted by mkb at 9:58 AM on October 24, 2012

I just happened to do it yesterday, and it worked for me within an hour or two.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 11:37 AM on October 24, 2012

Response by poster: Aha. This is anomalous, then. mkb, how did you report the bug? I'm having trouble finding any way to contact them.
posted by ignignokt at 2:12 PM on October 24, 2012

Response by poster: OK, never mind - I have a very old email filter that I forgot about that hid the download ready notification from me.

Something to note: The "expanded archive" that Facebook offers doesn't include the basic archive (which has your statuses and photos) as well. So, I'm in the process of requesting that now.
posted by ignignokt at 2:28 PM on October 24, 2012