This generation’s social media consumption (read addiction) is exponentially increasing. It’s getting more & more diverse as time goes on and the dopamine hit wears off. I am part of this generation. It’s me, I am the problem, it’s me.
While we make bad choices with our private data to stay connected, I wanted to prepare and safeguard my data. Hence, yet another blog in the Future Vipul series on backing your “virtual life” hosted on popular “potentially secure” social media platforms.
Why create backups?
- Guaranteed ownership of data your created (My reason)
- Other reasons include, bad actors taking control of your online identity.
- Accidental deletion of assets.
- Voilating terms of use and getting banned on platforms.
- Saying half a word wrong about the ruling political party. India special.
- Saying half a word wrong about anything. Getting canceled by the faceless mob.
- Transferring data out to another platform of choice.
- …
- Internet blackouts, natural disasters, break down of civilization.
… Should I keep going? Whatever your reason is, keeping data backed up with multiple fail safes is generally the best practice. Read my last guide on backing up personal systems with Rustic and Rsync and how I fail to run what I preach.
I am convinced, what can we back up?
Goals are to backup whatever you can in the most automated way possible. Our aim with this guide would be to extract the data being shared, comments, metadata, geotags, and even if possible any other interactions. This could be possible by:
- Using data download options on platforms to pull whatever we can from the app. First party.
- Use third-party tools to extract the remaining
- Reduce our digital footprint overall by assessing the data.
Let’s get started.
Most important to me, Instagram
I use Instagram to document the experience I had. The private account I started in 2017 holds a lot of personal value to me and contains a lot of highlights that prompted me to backup Instagram.
- Download your data from Instagram using their app or website. Make sure to choose the HTML version. Much better UX.
- Instagram will authenticate, and take in your request to get back to you.
- I got notified by email and the downloads were 3 files, each a 2.4 gig chunk
If that download doesn’t include everything, then give Instaloader a go. It’s a Python utility to download archives of Instagram data. Here are the following commands I use.
- To download all posts, reels, and highlights (requires login)
instaloader vipulgupta2048_ -l vipulgupta2048_ --highlights --igtv --sanitize-paths --no-iphone --no-metadata-json
I don’t particularly like the structure in which it downloads so recommend experimenting with the options to get the best out of the tool. Instaloader can resume downloads as well as keep files up to date.
Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal
I am not the one to care for Whatsapp conversations and assets shared. Usually, I haven’t regretted losing any of the documents sent to me or I have sent to someone else. A bit of trauma back at uni was us getting into someone’s Gmail account. It is unethical but they left the session open on the computer and for educational purposes, we decided to take it on a run.
The amount of data someone can have when they get your Gmail account access is obscene but what’s more concerning is getting access to data backups made in Google Drive of services like Whatsapp. So following the YOLO lifestyle, Whatsapp stays on no backups.
Telegram hosts everything on their server so essentially each item is forever hosted there only.
I have lost chats on Signal Desktop quite a bit of time due to database corruption so no surprise will be there when I lose them fully and life will continue to go on.
Somehow I still have a Facebook Account
I promptly deactivated that. I told you this activity helps in cleaning your digital footprint.
I consider tweets to be ephemeral. So not very motivated to preserve those either. But, if you are looking to keep them around then “Download data” option could prove to be helpful. While writing this blog post, I did make a request on Twitter for my data. Let’s see what comes back.
Another great idea to preserve your tweets would be to use the multitude of “Save twitter threads” bots available. Using a bot like unroll or threader might be a great move to save your Twitter threads from the many scenarios I discussed above.
Finishing up
This will be an active blog post where I will try to add more platforms and better yet automated ways of backing up profiles. I only cared about Instagram which got me started writing this post. Probably not helpful to most people since they don’t consider social media profiles important. While I am trying to be that person and continue to reduce my digital footprint. Till that happens it pays to be more cautious than careless.
Also, till next time. Stay in the mix.