There’s no option to backup a Twitter, or Facebook inbox on site – So If your social network accounts should disappear overnight for any reason, then so does any and all data contained in them and you’ll never see it again.

*Note: Since this article was written, Facebook have now introduced a new system into their GUI with which you can download everything that you’ve uploaded to your profile to your local computer.

Although this method is fairly thorough, containing image, html, etc, files; I’m unsure as to the extent of the back-reaching chronology of the download.

Some of you might just ask “Who cares?” and not be bothered about it. Others, devotees of social media, may be extremely concerned about this. – To them this data is very important as they’ve devoted so much time and effort to it.

Were you aware that, although everything you send to social media is archived to at least some extent by third parties, that Twitter itself only stores your 3200 most recent tweets at any given time. As I said, everything is archived in some way by third parties such as search-engines like Google; but not always exactly as it was sent or presented on the social media site, not always completely either, and it can at times be rather difficult to find.

- Yet most people have no idea of this, and assume that their data will always be there should they need it, exactly as they first typed it, in full, forever. -This despite the numerous periods of downtime previously, as well as the continuing occasional appearance of the famous Fail Whale, experienced by Twitter, and the bugs that Facebook is affected by at times too, including those introduced by its seemingly masochistic programmers, causing numerous privacy leaks as well as application failures and occasional downtime in certain regions. – Also, there are always hackers to worry about, who could delete your account if they could get into it, or empty it and use it for spam.

Alternatively, you might want to be able to back up your social media accounts so that you can access the information when offline. Offline access to postings to social networks can be valuable, because it allows you to get hold of contact information, comments, photos, and anything else that may be important to you. Offline access also lets you sort and organize the data that’s contained in your social networking account for easier analysis and access. Having such backups will also allow you to find messages that have been deleted, should you need to do so. 

A social media backup tool can provide you with peace of mind, as well as save you a lot of aggravation and misery if you need to restore your account or remember what you once had after it’s gone: There is no guarantee that any free social networking site will still be there tomorrow. – So with that in mind, let’s look at two pieces of social media backup software:

Backup My Tweets

Backup My Tweets is a social media backup solution. It works with Twitter, and it’s free. With it you can back up all of your tweets. – remember, though, that Twitter only stores your latest 3200 tweets.which is a huge advantage since Twitter does not store more than 3200 tweets at a time. These backups will allow you to save your social media files in XML, JSON, or HTML format. The makers also do another program called BackupMyMail, which works with Gmail, Hotmail, and Windows Live accounts. Why not check it out too?

SocialSafe

Another of the backup options that you have for your Facebook account, among others,  is called SocialSafe. This one is not free, but it’ll only set you back $2.99 including add-ons and updates. It runs in Adobe Air; so you’ll need to download that if you don’t already have it installed Having done that you can then backup everything in your Facebook account, including photos, photos you were tagged in, posts, and profile information. SocialSafe works as a multiplatform tool for Windows or Mac. After you’ve backed up your Facebook account, you can access all the files offline with a text editor, word processor, or photo editing software.

(Backing up MySpace profiles etc is maybe the least straightforward of all. ( – As most of it is teenage-style low-quality graphics.) However do read this tutorial which explains how to backup your MySpace messages.)

Do you know of any others? If so then please do let us know in a comment.