(ABC 6 News) – Following up on yesterday’s story about the importance of locking down your Facebook account, I want to discuss how to save everything you’ve ever uploaded to Facebook—all of the photos,
memories, posts, friend information, and everything else. Most people don’t know this is
possible until after their accounts have been hacked and they’ve lost everything.

Facebook accounts are hacked and lost every day—thousands of them! Hackers love to target
Facebook users, and when an account is hacked, there’s little chance you’ll ever regain access
to it.

If you try to get help, you’ll find Facebook has no customer service phone number or email
address to speak with a real person.

If you’ve been on Facebook for many years and uploaded photos you don’t have anywhere
else, this might be the most important thing you do all week.

Not a week goes by when I don’t get a handful of emails asking for help because their Facebook
account has been hacked and they can’t access the photos and things they’ve uploaded over
the years. Sadly, if that happens, those things are gone forever. But you can download
everything ahead of time with just a few clicks.

Download everything you care about onto a computer. Go to Facebook’s settings, scroll down to
find “access and download your information”. You’ll be led to visit your accounts center where
you can download everything you’ve uploaded to Facebook.

Select what you want to download. You can select both Facebook and Instagram. You can
select only photos and posts, but you might want to select “download everything”.

Then, you’ll be asked where to save it. If you’re on a computer, download it there. You can also
choose to download it to a Google Drive or Dropbox account.

When you choose a format for the download, an HTML file allows you to view your information
and data. I suggest downloading it in JSON format, which will allow you to import everything into
a new Facebook account if you lose access to the one you have now.

Depending on how much you’ve uploaded to Facebook this can take several days to complete.
When you get an email from Facebook saying the download is ready, click on it fairly soon or
you’ll have to start the process over again.

And be vigilant about protecting your Facebook page from hackers. Some 300,000 Facebook
accounts are hacked every single day.