Been looking for convenient and easy way to archive your Facebook account? Well, tough patooties. There’s no convenient and easy way to do it, but we’ll outline a few methods you can try below. Like many users, I’ve been pondering how Facebook fits into my life, and how I feel about Mark Zuckerberg’s longstanding arrogant disregard for our privacy. I’m not alone; although Quit Facebook Day was a bust, according to a recent Soros poll 60% of users are thinking about quitting, and 16% already have. And although “How Do I Delete My Facebook Account” spiked as a search term in May, there are no numbers to indicate a mass exodus from Facebook yet. I personally won’t be quitting, but Facebook is no longer the more closed, verified network it was when I joined, and that was what I actually valued most about it. As a result, I’ve decided to change how I use Facebook a little bit until something better comes along, and part of that meant archiving and deleting my wall. I might have just deleted it all, but my friends are just too darn witty, and their comments just too precious and ginormously highlarious to click into oblivion. So how do you archive these sentimental treasures? Unfortunately, you can’t just go to “File > Save As” with your Facebook wall. Because of the fact that the site makes such extensive use of proprietary AJAX-like code, you can save a page, but rarely with the comment threads and older posts expanded. Even if you could do it this way, you’d end up with one massive, browser-crashing web page. So I put several tools to use, because each had its own shortcoming. The first thing I tried was the Firefox plug-in ArchiveFB. It’s based on another plug-in called Scrapbook, and allows you to fairly easily 
archive your Photos, Messages, Activity Stream, Friends List, Notes, Events, and Groups. The main drawback? If you’ve had a busy wall that goes back months and months, ArchiveFB at present has no way to control the dates you’re archiving, and while it expands older posts, it fails (much like simply saving a page) to expand comment threads. Still pretty cool for a free plug in though. I then coughed up the $2.99 for SocialSafe. If the developers continue to improve this tool, it would be just the ticket. The biggest problem? Although it expands comment threads and pages much more effectively than ArchiveFB, it has a known “bug” wherein it stops archiving status posts somewhere around 30-60 days back, so you get people’s comments, but don’t know what they were commenting on! It does have a simple interface though, and does a nice job of doing what it says it will do. So I used both of these tools, but being the OCD-afflicted twit that I am, I went the extra mile and used a combination of the Firefox Add-on PDFit and the text editor NoteTab Lite. What I did was expand the comments and older posts to about three screen lengths (around 2000 pixels), and used PDFit’s “Save As Image > Whole Page” function to save the page as a PNG file. The limitation here is that the text is embedded in an image file, so it can’t be easily copied to other formats, so I would then highlight the center column text and cut and paste it into NoteTab Lite, which would keep the line spacing but none of the visual elements. Yes. I know. That’s insane. But I figured since I had to manually delete it all anyway (as of this writing there’s no way to delete the Facebook wall with one click) the extra time was worth it. I think I got enough material for a twenty minute stand up routine this way. Smart and clever people’s unaware observational humor can be comedy gold on par with any Seinfeld episode. And staying connected with my friends and their wit are the thing (wait, that’s two things, isn’t it!) for which I will always have to thank Facebook.

SocialSafe is a cheap and easy to use back up tool that’s still in development: