How to Backup Your Twitter Account

Adapted from my original article entitled How to Backup Your Twitter Account.

As Twitter grows in popularity, it's becoming more and more prone to bugs and data failure. If there was an error, you could lose your followers, preferences and old tweets! While they don't have an official data backup service, several third party options exist. This guide will show you have to use online backup software to make sure all your information is safe.

There are several backup services to choose from. This article is going to use the online backup software called Tweetake. There's no application to download and it works on any operating system! Go to http://tweetake.com to get started.

Enter your Twitter account name and password. You can choose to backup your followers, favorites, friends, tweet, or direct messages. You can also choose "Everything" which is probably the best idea. When you've picked an option click the "Get 'em!" button.

There will be a long pause before anything happens. The online backup software is doing all the work for you, so just give it time. Eventually you'll automatically start downloading the backup. It's a really small file, so it shouldn't take long.

The online backup software generates and downloads a CSV (comma separated value) file. This file stores all your variables in a simple comma seperated format. Using one of these can be a little tricky. Be default your computer might want to open it with textedit or notepad. You can likely view it in that, although spreadsheet software like Numbers or Excel would work much better.

Additional Tips

• TweetBackup is another power online backup software.
• Twitter doesn't keep your old tweets, so this is also a good solution for that.
• Having a CSV file is good for referencing!
• If online backup software isn't your thing, you could also try TwitterBackup, Twitter XML, or FriendBackup. Most of these applications require windows and java.