On December 19, 2012 Twitter introduced the ability to download your Twitter archive, so you’ll get all your Tweets (including Retweets) going back to the beginning. Once you have your Twitter archive, you can view your Tweets by month, or search your archive to find Tweets with certain words, phrases, hashtags or @usernames. You can even engage with your old Tweets just as you would with current ones.
What was your first Tweet? Share it with us! Here are instructions on how to download your Twitter archive: support.twitter.com/articles/20170…
— Support (@Support) December 19, 2012
Because the feature is available only to a small subset of users, there’s a chance you won’t see the button yet.
Here is how to download your Twitter archive.
1. Go to Settings
Go to Settings and scroll down to the bottom to check for the option to request your Twitter archive.
If you do see it, go ahead and click the button. You’ll receive an email with instructions on how to access your archive when it’s ready for you to download.
2. Check for Email from Twitter
Make sure the twitter.com domain is not on your blacklist and that your email client is not classing messages from Twitter as spam. Sometimes you can get bad Twitter email, but this is one you don’t want to miss. Creating an archive of your Twitter account can take from a few minutes to hours and, in some cases, days.
3. Open your Twitter Archive
Once your download completes, unarchive the ZIP file to your desktop or elsewhere. Open a ReadMe file inside which contains instructions on the archive structure.
The easiest way to browser your Twitter archive entails opening the index.html file in your browser (it’s in the root folder). This will produce a nicely done web interface which does a good job of letting you navigate your entire history of tweets with efficiency and ease.
Takeaway
Not seeing an option to download your archive? Don’t worry! We’re working on rolling this feature out to all users over the coming weeks.
— Support (@Support) December 19, 2012
Twitter is rolling out this feature slowly, starting 12/19/12 with a small percentage of users whose language is set to English. Over the coming weeks and months, they will make it available to all users around the world, for all the languages they offer.
Image credit: Twitter, iDownloadBlog
