Manuals for self-archiving individual social media accounts

This is the second deliverable (D2) of the project Best practices for archiving social media in Flanders and Brussels by KADOC and meemoo with support from the Flemish Government. It is the result of WP1: preparation for capturing individual accounts in which various tools and APIs were tested for capturing social media accounts.

There are roughly two ways to archive your own social media accounts:

using the archiving functions of the social media platforms themselves;
using ArchiveWeb.page.

In this deliverable, we provide manuals for both methods.

Authors

Nastasia Vanderperren with contributions from Rony Vissers (meemoo)

Method 1: archiving functions of social media platforms

The simplest way to archive your own social media accounts is through the archiving functions of the platforms. They allow you to archive the own content from your own social media accounts. Content from others, such as comments and shared posts, is removed from the web archive or anonymized. The resulting web archive is a ZIP file consisting of at least one HTML file through which the archive can be viewed in a browser. HTML files can be opened in a browser like Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

Available manuals:

Method 2: ArchiveWeb.page

If you want to include third-party content in the archive of your social media account, we recommend using ArchiveWeb.page. This is software that can record a browsing session and then save it in a WARC file. WARC is the standard format for preserving web archives.

This method is also the best way to archive your Facebook group. The Facebook archiving function is not available for Facebook groups.

Available manuals: