Does Downloading Facebook Data Ever Work?

It’s the third time I couldn’t download my Facebook data. It never worked even once.

It’s fast and easy to start the process and wait for an email with the download notification. Unfortunately I never get one. I only get emails confirming the failure of the export 48 hours later: “Please retry your Facebook download.”

>We’re sorry. Something went wrong and we weren’t able to put together a copy of your Facebook data. Please start the process again by visiting your account settings and clicking ”Download a copy of your Facebook data.”

Great. This didn’t help at all. To answer my own question I asked in the headline: not for me.

Update 2015-02-05

Finally it worked and I downloaded an archive. But apart from the downloaded media like images and videos, the rest is just plain HTML files. Those files don’t have much data compared to what Facebook is harvesting. The only useful info is friend’s names and email addresses and messages.

Update 2018-05-28

Finally I deleted my Facebook account after exporting it one last time. I decided to do this maybe a year ago, after I didn’t use Facebook on purpose. I waited for the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to happen to be sure that Facebook has to actually delete my data and not keep it around to abuse it even more. Life is good.

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)