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”.

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.

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/

 

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.

 

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

 

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:

 

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

 

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!