Backup Facebook Accounts
Many online services do not offer the means to backup data locally. Users who want to backup data are usually left with a tedious manual process (like downloading pictures or videos one by one). Data that cannot be downloaded right away is even harder to backup, think of contacts or private messages for example.
Archive Facebook is an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The purpose of the add-on is to provide the tools to backup facebook accounts. The add-on can backup photos, messages, friends list, notes, events, groups, information and the activity stream. And since it is an experimental add-on it is likely that the developers will add new features to it in the future.
Here is how the add-on works:
- An ArchiveFB entry is added to the Firefox Tools menu after installation of the add-on
- Activate ArchiveFV > Archive from the menu after logging into a Facebook account
- The process is automatic and can take minutes or even hours depending on the data in the account
- A Facebook menu option is added to the ArchiveFB menu giving the user the option to view archived accounts
Once the archiving process has completed, you will see an entry in the sidebar that says “Facebook | username date†where username is your Facebook username and date is the current date. Click on the entry. You will see your Facebook profile page appear and at the bottom will be an annotation bar where you can highlight text or make comments on a page for your personal records. Click through your archived Facebook pages to ensure that all pages have been archived. All pages listed in the introduction should be archived. You can tell if a page has been archived by placing your cursor over a link. Look in the bottom left hand corner and Firefox will show the location of the link i.e. if the location starts with “file://â€, it is on your hard drive, if it starts with “http://â€, it is on the web. If it is not on your local hard drive, try to archive your account again. If the second attempt doesn’t work, please notify us and we will attempt to fix the problem.
Facebook users who like to backup their Facebook accounts can download the Firefox add-on from the official Mozilla Firefox website.
Update: Facebook has now integrated a backup feature which means that it is no longer necessary to use third party tools to backup a Facebook account. Facebook users need to click on Account > Account Settings > Download your information to backup their data.
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thanks you saved my 1000 tabs :)
Fantastic! Thank you! This worked like a charm. Had exactly the same issue in Firefox on a PC and this fixed it.
Thank you for sharing this! Like you, I’d noticed that disabling/re-enabling the extension would work for that browser session, but I hadn’t tried anything yet to force a fix. I’m SO glad it was this easy!
I sure hope the OneTab team issues an official fix ASAP, though. Now that it’s been a few days, they’re starting to get bad reviews, which is unfortunate.
Yes! I also tried the workaround. I also reported this bug to OneTab team on the first day I faced this issue.
Thanks, Ashwin for the fix!
I was nearing desperation when I found your direction. It worked.
Thank you so much.
Hi, OneTab developer here. Sorry for this – it’s not clear why this bug is suddenly happening for some people, but we’re urgently investigating this with the Mozilla/Firefox team and will be providing a fix very shortly.
Thank you so much for sharing this fix! You saved my tabs. The only note/point I would like to add is for Step 2.
Perhaps put a note stating they should copy Step 3 and forward of your tutorial to Word. Once we close Firefox, we lose visibility to your tutorial. For me, I know I would not be able to remember the .bkp.
Again, thank you!
Easy temporary fix: To make OneTab work again, type “about:addons” in your Firefox address bar. Then find OneTab in the list of extensions, and click the blue toggle button twice. This will disable and then re-enable OneTab, and cause it to work again.
We’re working with Mozilla for a permanent fix. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is a very strange issue that is only affecting the Firefox version of OneTab.
I have found by disabling and then re-enable in the add on menu I get my tab back. Short term fix. Will try yours.
Thank you. I thought I had lost a month of digging. I’ll be a little more attentive about exporting the urls from the extension list now. It’s a great tool but Firefox doesn’t always play nice with its extensions.
Good news – I’ve been working with Mozilla all morning to resolve this. Mozilla have confirmed it was due to a bug in Firefox (related to extension permissions downgrades).
To fix OneTab, just go to “about:addons” in your Firefox address bar, click the ‘cog’ icon in the top right, and click ‘Check for updates’. This will upgrade you to OneTab v1.39, which fixes the issue.
Darn, I tried everything here and I still can’t get my tabs back. I even did a full system restore to a point last week hoping that my saved tabs would be in the old .xpi file, but no luck.
I’m pretty disappointed :(
Probably I should’ve been more patient, but now I don’t know how to feel about this. I lost about 900 tabs in the recovery process (I reinstalled OneTab), which, incredible as it sounds, weren’t all just a messy dump I’m never going back to, but actually important stuff (yeah, I have a peculiar workflow).
Trying to suppress the anger and reflecting on what happened, it seems I should blame myself for not having a backup. But surely I couldn’t back it up manually every time I save a tab, it would defy all purpose of having this addon in the first place. A couple of years ago data was stored at “~/.mozilla/firefox/%PROFILE%/jetpack/[email protected]/simple-storage”, and you could back it up with simple crontab. This is no longer the case, this folder is just empty. And since OneTab is closed-source black box, I couldn’t have done anything else as well.
So the only reasonable lesson to be learned is that I actually must stop relying on OneTab, since sooner or later it will let me down again. Fuck it.
I just disable and re-enable. No tabs lost!
I switched from OneTab to Tab Stash (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/) months ago and haven’t looked back. I had never experienced any data loss with OneTab, although I was a bit concerned by some reports of data loss I read about. My main issue was with OneTabs performance, it’s a hog. I had been looking for a replacement and testing out a ton of addons for a couple of months when I finally discovered Tab Stash, and am damn glad I did. I really can’t recommend it strongly enough…
Thanks, bsdaddict. Never tried it, looks nice, but I’m a bit concerned by small number of stashed tabs on these screenshots, not sure if it’d be usable when stashing a lot of tabs. How many tabs do you usually have stashed?
Tab Stash is is a great alternative to One Tab, y’all… I made the switch months ago and am very happy with it.
>DO THIS FIRST: Before trying the following fix, I recommend disabling OneTab and re-enabling it from the about:addons page, to access and regain your tabs.
Worked for me! Many, many thanks!
I know it’s late but ist there an option for chrome on android tablets aswell? My wife hates it that the search bar and Tab list will just come Up again when she Scrolls up
You are truly a hero and a scholar, sir or madam. I salute you!