How to Download Private Facebook Messages from One Person

beginning of facebook message conversation
Share the knowledge

Wondering how to download and archive all of the private Facebook chat messages you have exchanged with one particular person? Facebook does not make it easy to figure out how to save your entire private Facebook message chat thread with one particular person, so we will. Here’s how.

First, of course, Facebook does allow you to download all of your data in one big archive zip file. To do that, just go to your Settings area on Facebook, and right at the bottom of your General Account Settings page, you will see a link to “Download a copy of your Facebook data”.

how to download facebook data

But this downloads all of your data, including all of your messages, and in the general Facebook message format (it creates an html archives which is basically like being on Facebook offline).

But if you want to simply download all of your messages with one particular person, and in an easy-to-read format, you are out of luck.

The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.

CashApp us Square Cash app link

Venmo us Venmo link

Paypal us Paypal link

Or are you?

By using the method below, you can easily save your private Facebook message conversation with one particular person. It’s not elegant, but it is simple, and it works.

Go to the Facebook private message conversation that you wish to save. Do not do this by clicking on the chat bubble icon, but rather by going to http://www.facebook.com/messages/

facebook chat dialogue bubble balloon

facebook message url

 

Go to the message thread that you want to save, and scroll all the way back to the very first message. If your thread contains thousands of messages, this may take a while, but we promise it will be worth it.

beginning of facebook message conversation

 

Now select a small part of the conversation by clicking on it and dragging your cursor down (by dragging your mouse or trackpad down).

facebook messages selected

 

At this point, you have two options:

1) You can keep dragging the selected area from the start of the conversation all the way to the end. This is the cleaner way to do it, but if you have thousands of messages in the conversation it can take you a while.

2) With a little bit of the conversation selected, you can then do a “select all”. On a Mac, this is done with the combination Command + A (hold down the command key, and then while holding down the command key, press the letter A). On a Windows computer, similarly select CTRL + A. This will select the entire conversation, but it will also include all of the rest of the text in the window, which you will then need to edit out (or not).

This is how it looks if you use method #1:

how to download all facebook messages

 

This is how it looks if you use method #2:

how to download all facebook chat messages

 

Now, whichever method you use, you want to do a “copy” of all of the selected text. You can do this either by going to the Edit menu of your browser, and selecting “Copy”, or by doing either a Command + C (Macs) or a CTRL + C (Windows).

Once you have copied all of the text, simply paste it into your favourite editor or word processor, and you will have the entire Facebook message conversation!

Again, not elegant, but it is effective!

Get New Internet Patrol Articles by Email!

The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.

CashApp us Square Cash app link

Venmo us Venmo link

Paypal us Paypal link

 


Share the knowledge

4 thoughts on “How to Download Private Facebook Messages from One Person

  1. If you use Chrome, you can try the extension which is called Facebook Chat Downloader, I’ve been saving my chats with it lately.
    here’s the link

  2. Yeah okay what if you have over 90,000 messages? I’ve been messaging a friend for years on Facebook – what if I want to save that conversation? It will literally take days to scroll up with this solution.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.