Yesterday I kicked off the long gestating project to import all my old Facebook content to this website. I requested my archive several months ago, and since then I’ve been working on deleting all my content there. (It’s such a pain to delete your content without deleting the account. I’ll write up a post about that later.) Anyway, the import is now happening and you can see the posts appearing here.
The exported data is a mess though, which has made the import script a real pain. You can post to Facebook from lots of other apps (and I did, over the years), and not all of the data is in there in the same ways. There are so many cases where data is just missing from the JSON. Like, you can post to Facebook from Eventbrite, and all that’s in the export is me saying “Booked in!” and “Kris Howard posted something via Eventbrite.” but the actual event isn’t linked or listed at all. It’s just gone. I’ve found other examples too, like Instagram. (Fortunately I already imported all my Instagram posts, so I’m just skipping over those.) But I’m only 10% of the way through, and I’m doing a lot of manual cleanup work.
On the upside, this project (as well as my Instagram and Twitter import) have taught me so much about archiving and data portability. I’m happy that I will have some sort of record of this data, even if it’s not 100% complete. I’ll never end up in this situation again, and hopefully I can help a few others realise the pitfalls of entrusting your data to corporations.
4 responses