Teachers: Yes, you can leave ‘X’ and not lose (mostly) everything you’ve collated. Here’s how.

A couple of weeks ago I gave my reasons for leaving ‘X’ (Twitter), despite the fact that I have cultivated so many useful teaching tid-bits, useful links and resources and insights from colleagues. For me, staying on that platform is akin to continue banking with a finance insitution that invests my money into weapons of war or fossil fuel endeavours… but I can understand way folks might stay put due to the lack of choice or losing access to such a resource bank.

However, you can have your cake and eat it… well, mostly. You’ll be able to jump-ship and still retain most of what you had. This isn’t full-proof and you’ll need to be content that taking the moral decision to leave ‘X’ will come at a cost. Here’s how to cushion that cost a little if you’ve amassed useful stuff.

Don’t wait to do this. It seems that the platform is in flames at the moment, with quite an exodus off the platform (most folks are heading to Bluesky). The cynic in me feels that they may pull the function to archive your activity if there is a mass of people who choose to do that with the intention of deleting their account.

Step 1: Log into ‘X’ and request to download your archive

1. Log into ‘X‘ and click on ‘More’ on the left hand side
2. Click ‘Settings & Privacy’
3. Under ‘Your account’, select ‘Download an archive of your data’
4. You’ll then need to verify your credentials (e.g. password, two-factor authentication if turned on)
5. Then you can click ‘Request archive’

You’ll then get a message to say it could take at least 24 hours for your archive to be ready. The more active your account has been, and the longer it’s been active then it’ll take longer. Mine took about a week to come through!

In the meantime, if you are keen and certain that you’re coming off ‘X’, then I would lock your account (Settings > Privacy and safety > Audience, media and tagging > Protect your posts/videos), and head over to your alternative platform of choice and set up shop there, getting used to it while you wait for your ‘X’ archive’

Step 2: Download your archive

Eventually you will get both an email and notification alert that your archive is ready to download. On a desktop/laptop, simply download the archive by clicking on the notification and then the ‘blue button’. The archive might be quite big, mine was almost 3GB!

On PC’s, the archive will likely download to your “This PC” > “Downloads” folder, and will have a folder name of ‘twitter-yyyy-mm-dd’.

Step 3: Get used to exploring your archive

The achive is a HTML file, which means it will open in your default web-browser, so you won’t need a specialist program. Open the ‘twitter-yyyy-mm-dd’ folder, and double click on ‘Your archive.html’.

The archive user interface is pretty similar to the platform itself. You can browse your Tweets, Likes, DMs. This is great, because I know that using the ‘Like’ button was a great way to ‘bookmark’ a useful tweet, resource or link. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem that bookmarks themselves are archived – bear that in mind.

Step 4: Appreciate what’s saved, what is linked and what is not

Everything on your archive is saved locally on your computer – which means it’s yours to keep and you can’t lose it now if you delete your ‘X’ account. However, bear in mind that many of your archived tweets will contain links back to the platform. So of course, if those links point to now deleted tweets or accounts, they’ll be broken. This includes your images and videos. Fortunately, your images and videos are saved!

If you right click on an image and select ‘Open image in new tab’ (or similar), there it is in its full glory. The address bar in your browser will tell you what the file name is, and you’ll be able to search for this file name in the archives ‘Data’ > ‘tweets_media’ folder.

External links will still work, so long as the destination is still live. So any tweet that you liked containing a link to a useful website will still be accesible.

Of course, the archive doesn’t save replies to you unless you liked or retweeted them. So they will be lost, but you probably would have liked a useful reply.

Step 5: Once satisfied, securely delete your account

Once you feel you’ve got what you need and you’re all set up on an alternative platform or two, then you should delete your ‘X’ account.

This is your choice, and you should make the informed decision to do so. Usual disclaimer here as in while I recommend this, I’m not responsible for you chosing to go ahead. In my opinion, there is now no real purpose to keep it live and be used as a data mine for Musk. Yes, I do understand that it’ll be a little heartbreaking given all the time and energy we (as a teaching community) has spent on that. However, sheding toxicity is the healthy option.

You can find the ‘Deactivate your account’ option under ‘More’ > ‘Settings & Privacy’ > ‘Your account’.

My account will be gone by the end of the calendar year. In the meantime, I’ve locked my account, archived it, and removed all it’s content using a tool called ‘Redact’. All that’s up there is a little message in my bio telling folks where I’ve gone.

I hope you found this useful! If you have any thoughts, tips or comments about this process and what you can do with the archive, please drop them in the comments.