How to delete Facebook without losing your friends and photos

Casey Neistat wrote an article back in 2014 how he ‘fixed’ his Facebook by unfriending people who shared too much. I tried this in 2017… and it absolutely didn’t work!

People still share way too much and every time I go on Facebook it feels like like a whole plague of negativity that’s trying to give me cancer. Just no. It’s not cool. Facebook really isn’t the ‘cool’ platform it was back in 2008.

The thing is, I can’t just go and delete it. Having lived abroad, there’s a whole lot of connections with people and photos I uploaded over the years, that I don’t wanna lose. But thankfully there’s a way to do both:

• Log into Facebook. Don’t look at any of the cancerous content on your feed and go directly into settings
• Click on “Your Facebook Information”
• Click on “download your information”
• Now you’ve got a whole lot of options regarding what you want to download

I deselected everything and only chose “Photos and Videos” and “Friends.” Why? Well I honestly don’t care what I posted. It’s probably all embarrassing shit anyway. I’d rather not be relive it. Oh and the format — as a programmer, I chose JSON.

I then click on Create File. This basically generates a compressed .zip file with all the data you requested. It takes about an hour till its ready for you to download.

Eventually it’s ready to download.

And now it’s downloading.

After downloading it successfully, I backed it up onto my external hard drive.

Extracting it, it gives me a lot of files. These are all my photos.

Now, to keep these files secure (it’s already on my hard disk, but I need a little bit extra), I backed them up onto my Google Photos account. About 1,900 images.

As for my friend list.. well.. It’s all in JSON format.. So now you can essentially use the power of your brain to think how your friend looked.
If you can’t, well then you probably weren’t friends anyway. Sorry.

I’ll still figure out what I’m gonna do with the friends list. But hey, at least I have names, which is essentially my biggest weakness. I’m terrible with names.

What’s left now, is to delete your account.

• Click Settings
• Click Your Facebook Information in the left column
• Click Delete Your Account and Information, then click Delete My Account
• Enter your password, click Continue and then click Delete Account

And now live happily ever after.

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