Worried about losing your Insta-content in an outage? Want to snag some video from other influencers to keep forever? Here’s how it’s done.
The great Facebook outage of 2021 is over (for now), but in the DNS snafu that took down the popular yet controversial social network, there was collateral damage. Namely, other services owned by Facebook, including WhatsApp and Instagram, also went dark, and along with them, your digital memories. That’s why it’s smart to occasionally back up your social accounts, even if they’re already in the cloud—such as all your Insta-pics. We’ll show you how. But what about memories you’ve seen posted by others? As on Facebook or YouTube, there are copyright and revenue-earning reasons not to grab someone else’s video. But we know you’ll only use our instructions on how to download photos and videos from Instagram for good. Download Your Instagram Content The steps to do this couldn’t be simpler. On the desktop, navigate to instagram.com, click your avatar icon at the upper right and select Settings > Privacy and Security. Click the link under Data Download that says Request Download. In the mobile app, the steps are slightly different. Go to your Profile (the icon at the lower right), then click the 3-line menu at the upper right to select Settings > Security > Download Data. You’ll see a Get a Copy of Your Information page. On the desktop, you get two choices—either download it in an easy-to-navigate HTML format or get it as a JSON data file that you can import into other services. Pick one and click Next. You’ll then have to re-enter your Instagram password and click Request Download.
