How can I download all messages from Facebook?

Question

How can I download all my private messages from Facebook?

I don't really want to have to scroll through the actual messages, wait for older ones to load, and copy and paste since I have 7k+ messages so far.

I tried downloaded my messages through Facebook's archive thingy, but it only seemed to save the latest 20-30 messages per person, and not every message.

I'm now trying to download Facebook's extended archives, but based on the FAQ questions, but idk if it'll have the rest of my messages.

Edit: I gave it another try, and it looks like this is no longer the case.

I'm open to any solution.

Answer 1

To download your data, log into Facebook, then click the little arrow in the top right and select "Account Settings".

In the bottom left of your "General Account Settings" find the line of text that says "Download a copy of your Facebook data" and click the link.

Answer 2

You can try going to http://m.facebook.com/ and click on "Messages".

Select a person to view the history, and click on "See Older Messages" once.

Notice that &start= part in the URL, that's the number of received and sent messages minus 7.

Notice the &page_size=7 part in the URL. Currently, Facebook does not limit this number, you can set that to a number bigger than the start value. This makes it disable pagination and displays all the messages it found, except the skipped 7. (If the number's smaller, somehow Facebook will display only 7).

Answer 3

I use a tool called SocialSafe that backs up all of (well, pretty much all of) my Facebook content, and that now includes messages. I can search through them all, and also jump see in the little diary part of it all of the different things that I've done on Facebook over the years.

Answer 4

There is an add-on for Firefox which downloads your facebook inbox and saves it in txt files. Take a look here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/red1/ or here: http://www.facebook.com/Red1MessageArchiver

Answer 5

So, I managed to hack together a solution:

Facebook (at the time of writing) loads old messages if you scroll all the way to the top, with the newest messages being kept at the bottom.

I wrote a Greasemonkey script to force the webpage to constantly jump to the top, making Facebook load approximately 6000 messages in about 5-8 minutes. I then copied and pasted everything to a text file, which I can later parse and prettify at my own leisure.

The script is below:

// ==UserScript==
// @name        ScrollToTop
// @namespace   Deflect
// @description Perpetually scrolls to the top of the screen until disabled.
// @include     *
// @version     1
// ==/UserScript==

var amScrolling = false;

var perpetualScroll = function () {
    var createLink = function () {
        var scrollLink = document.createElement('a');
        scrollLink.className = (scrollLink.className || "") + ' topScroll';
        scrollLink.style.display = 'block';
        scrollLink.style.position = 'fixed';
        scrollLink.style.bottom = '1em';
        scrollLink.style.right = '1em';
        scrollLink.style.color = '#fff';
        scrollLink.style.backgroundColor = '#000';
        scrollLink.style.padding = '0.5em';
        scrollLink.href = '#';
        scrollLink.textContent = 'Start Scroll';
        scrollLink.onclick = function (e){
            amScrolling = !amScrolling;
            if (amScrolling) {
                scrollLink.style.backgroundColor = '#333';
                scrollLink.textContent = 'Stop Scroll';
            } else {
                scrollLink.style.backgroundColor = '#000';
                scrollLink.textContent = 'Start Scroll';
            }
            return false;
        };
        return scrollLink;
    };

    var scrollDiv = document.createElement("div");
    scrollDiv.id = "topScroll0x2a";
    scrollDiv.appendChild(createLink());
    document.body.appendChild(scrollDiv);

    var scroll = function () {
        if (amScrolling) {
            window.scrollTo(0, 0);
        }
    };

    var intervalId = window.setInterval(scroll, 50);
};

perpetualScroll();

However, this isn't an optimal solution because a lot of the work is still manual -- if I want to get the messages of multiple users, I still have to either do them one at a time, or open up multiple tabs or something.

If you wanted to, you could probably modify the script to programmatically detect when it's hit the top of the screen, grab all the messages, prettify it, and slap it onto pastebin or something, but I didn't feel like doing all that work.

Edit:

Now that Facebook's changed their UI on the main messaging page, I'm not so sure if this hack works anymore. I'm going to unaccept this as an answer (but leave it as reference), and pick a new one after I've had a chance to try the other ones out.

Answer 6

There is absolutely no provision to download all the private messages from a Facebook account - Facebook doesn't gives any such option.

Also, it is impossible to any Facebook App/API (third party) can ever be made to do it, because no matter what, there is no provision for an app to get access to a user's private messages.

The API can get Profile Pic, Name, Friends Name, What time you log into Facebook, etc... but no way it can get into your private messages.

Only Option

You do it manually - which is not practical or else you can locally have an Internet-bot in your system to do it for you.

Searching through Google, I didn't find any such existing bot, but it is possible to make one.

Answer 7

http://www.httrack.com/ use this offline website viewer, input your message page url of facebook and let it download all the mesages which you can browse from offline

I guess it should work