Backing Up Your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Other Social Media Accounts

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I’ve been doing some research in connection with an upcoming technology column I’ve written for the ABA Journal. The topic is backing up your social media accounts and it should appear in a month or two.

This topic is an important one for lawyers, and not just so you can learn how you can back up your own accounts. Understanding what backup and exporting methods and procedures are available will help lawyers help their clients when questions about obtaining social media account information arise in legal matters.  The landscape for social media backup has changed in the past year or so. It’s definitely getting easier, although not necessarily all that easy, to get at least some data out of these platforms.

The upcoming closure of the social media platform Posterous recently sounded a warning for people who keep a lot of data on social media platforms (pictures, updates, etc.) that even longtime social media platforms can go away. Posterous users got an email with instructions on how to get a copy of their data that resides on Posterous before it no longer will be accessible.

I thought I’d share some of the resources I found that are helpful guides to social media backup:

• How to Backup Your Social Media Accounts – Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram – Mark Wilson, How-to Geek Blog
• Social Site Backup Solutions: Backupify and SocialSafe – Beth Z, Your Nerdy Best Friend blog
• Backup Your Social Media Content Because Even Big Sites Close Down – Melissa Ford, BlogHer
• How To Backup Your Facebook Data In 5 Easy Steps – Taylor Hatmaker, ReadWrite
• Exporting Your Connections and Profile – LinkedIn
• LinkedIn’s Data Request Policy

For those of you wanting to delve into ways social media platforms might change aspects of litigation practices, checking out the new book from the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section called “Social Media as Evidence,” by Joshua Briones and Ana Tagvoryan, would be a good place to start.

For the rest of us, just knowing that it is now possible to get copies of your social media data is good news in itself. As they say about backup, it’s a matter of “when,” not “if.”