How to Export Your Facebook Posts to Google Drive

If you want to export your Facebook posts for any reason (I’ll leave it to you to decide why), you can now dump these and your notes to a Google Doc, Blogger, or WordPress.

Personally, I have no need to keep all the dumb things I’ve said on Facebook over the last 16 years, but I’m going to show you how to export your Facebook life to Google Docs. From there, you can do whatever you want with your memories. (I recommend downloading your digital life to a folder on your PC where you keep all of your other important and regularly backed-up data, and then never looking at it again.)

To get started, pull up your Facebook and visit your settings page, then navigate over to the Your Facebook Information section. There, you’ll want to click on “View” next to the new “Transfer a Copy of Your Information” line. Note the phrasing on that: You’re not moving or deleting old posts, simply copying them somewhere else. To get rid of them entirely, you’ll either have to go through them manually and delete them (ha!), or delete your entire Facebook account.

On the subsequent screen, select Posts (or Notes). You can’t pick and choose which Facebook posts or notes you want to transfer; everything you created on your Facebook profile (though not posts you made in groups or other pages) will be copied over. Also note that this will only copy your posts, not posts friends made on your Facebook page—big difference.

Pick your destination (Google Docs or Wordpress/Jetpack) and click Next. You will, as always, have to authenticate into the service and grant Facebook various permissions:

And once you’ve done that, your request will join the queue. Yes, it’s not an instant-transfer kind of a thing, but my transfer request is processing right now and I presume I’ll receive an email and/or Facebook notification when it’s good to go.

Fingers crossed that I don’t suddenly have 10,000 new documents in my Google Drive to deal with. While you’re waiting, you can also go back and repeat the process for your Facebook notes. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can even start copying your photos to another service, too.