How to back-up your Twitter account and contacts
Dan Thornton | August 20, 2008As fast as we’re twittering, new applications are appearing! Just last week I suggested to a friend we should work on a system for backing up Twitter information - this week there’s already a choice of two applications.
Tweetake will back up your Friends, Followers, Favourites, Your Tweets, or Everything from your Twitter account. It does warn that you’ll need to exit certain Twitter clients, like Tweetdeck. Within a minute or two, I had an Excel file with 19 days of my last Tweets, and a list of people with their name, id (number in which they joined Twitter), description, location, last status update, avatar location on Twitter’s servers, and whether their updates were protected. The only thing I couldn’t find was an indication of which ones were followers, and which ones were friends. So you really need to export your friends as a separate list.
It’s a nice quick system, but it relies on you regularly backing up your lists. One benefit is you can see how many people are on Twitter within your friends list - mine started with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone at 12 and 13, and went up to the highest number at 15,160,529, although there were about 20 people with strange id numbers.
Twittersafe, like Tweetake, requires you to sign in with your Twitter username and password. It takes a while to log in, and you’re presented with a red ‘Back Up’ button and a couple of sponsorship adverts. Click to Back Up and everything goes quiet for a while. There’s a blank bar, which I presume should be a status bar. And that seems to be about it.
There claims to be an option to download an Excel copy, and future features will possibly include one-click restoration of your followers, which might be handy. But unless someone else has more success, it’ll have to be Tweetake and manually re-adding people!
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