To archive your own Facebook videos in bulk, use Facebook's built-in Download Your Information tool — it exports everything you've posted, videos included, in a single downloadable archive, and no third-party downloader can match it. FB DownS saves one video at a time from a link, which is the right tool for a public clip you want to keep, but the wrong tool for backing up years of your own uploads. Facebook's export is complete, fully authorised, delivers your videos at the quality you chose when uploading, and doesn't route anything through anyone else's servers. If you only take one thing from this site, take this: for your own content, use the export.
Tools for archiving Facebook video content
People searching for batch downloaders, enterprise archiving platforms or subscription services to back up their Facebook videos are usually trying to solve this exact problem, and almost all of them are looking in the wrong place. A third-party tool has to fetch each video individually through a public link, which means rate limits, missing private posts, and files capped at whatever merged quality Facebook serves publicly. The official export sidesteps all three problems because it comes from inside your own account.
What Download Your Information actually is
Download Your Information (often shortened to DYI) is Facebook's data-portability feature. It compiles a copy of the information tied to your account — posts, photos, videos, comments, messages, profile details, ads data and more — and packages it into files you can download. You choose which categories to include, so you can request videos and posts only and skip the rest, which keeps the archive small and the wait short.
It lives in your account settings rather than on the main Facebook feed, which is why so many people never find it. On current builds it sits under the Accounts Center, in the section covering your information and permissions, as "Download your information". Facebook reshuffles these menus periodically; searching your settings for "download your information" is the quickest way to land on it regardless of the current layout.
Step-by-step: exporting all your videos
- Open Facebook on a desktop browser if you can — the export screens are easier to work with than on mobile, though the mobile app supports the same flow.
- Go to Settings, then Accounts Center, then the section for your information and permissions, and choose "Download your information".
- Select the profile or page you want to export, then choose to download to your device rather than transferring to another service.
- Pick "Some of your information" and tick the categories that hold your videos — posts, plus reels and stories if you used them — instead of exporting everything.
- Set the date range to "All time" for a full archive, or narrow it if you only need a specific period.
- Set the media quality to High so your videos come back at full resolution rather than compressed previews.
- Choose HTML if you want a browsable archive you can click through, or JSON if you plan to process the data with a script.
- Submit the request, then wait for Facebook's notification that the files are ready and download every part before the link expires.
Format, media quality and date range settings
Three settings decide what you actually get. Media quality is the one people regret: leaving it on a lower setting hands you visibly compressed videos, and re-running the export is the only fix. Always set it to High for an archive you intend to keep. Format changes only how the accompanying data is written — HTML produces a set of pages you can open in a browser and click through like a mini offline Facebook, while JSON produces structured data files. The videos themselves are ordinary MP4 files either way.
- Media quality: choose High — this is the setting that determines your video resolution.
- Format: HTML to browse the archive, JSON to process it programmatically.
- Date range: All time for a complete backup, or a narrow window for a smaller file.
- Categories: select posts, reels and stories rather than exporting your entire account.
- Destination: download to device, or transfer a copy directly to a supported cloud service.
How long the export takes and how you get it
Facebook builds the archive on its own schedule. A small request covering a short date range can be ready in minutes. A full-history export from an account with years of video can take hours, and Facebook itself warns it may take several days for the largest requests. You don't have to sit and wait — you'll get a notification and an email when it's done, and the files appear under the "Available files" or "Download" tab of the same screen you requested them from.
What's inside the archive
Unzip the archive and you'll find a folder structure organised by data category. Your videos live in the media folders alongside your photos, as standard MP4 files, with the accompanying HTML or JSON files recording captions, dates and which post each file belonged to. That metadata is genuinely valuable — it's how you tell an untitled clip from 2018 apart from an untitled clip from 2021 — so keep the data files with the media rather than pulling the MP4s out on their own.
One thing to be aware of: filenames inside the export are machine-generated. If you're building a long-term library, work from the HTML index to identify each video before renaming, and do it in batches while you still have the archive's context in front of you.
Transferring a copy straight to cloud storage
Instead of downloading to your device, Facebook can transfer a copy of your information directly to certain third-party services, including several cloud storage and photo providers. It's the same export machinery with a different destination, and it saves you the download-then-upload round trip on a large archive. The list of supported destinations changes over time, so check what's offered on the transfer screen when you run it.
That transfer option is Facebook's, not ours. FB DownS has no cloud integration at all — our downloads go from Facebook's CDN straight into your browser's download folder, with nothing passing through our servers and no record kept. If you want a downloader's output in the cloud, point your browser at a synced folder and let Dropbox, Drive or iCloud handle the upload.
When to use a link downloader instead
The export is for your own content. It cannot give you someone else's video, because it only contains data tied to your account. When you want to keep a specific public video — a tutorial, a recipe clip, a public page's announcement — copy its link and paste it into /facebook-video-download. That's a single-video job, which is exactly what the tool is built for.
Bear in mind the quality ceiling differs. A link-based download gives you the best merged file Facebook serves publicly, which in practice is usually 720p HD rather than 1080p or 4K. Your own export gives you what you uploaded, at the quality you chose. That gap alone is a good reason to use the export whenever the video is yours.
Keeping the archive usable long term
Treat the export as a backup, not a filing system. Store the unzipped archive somewhere you'll actually find it, keep a second copy on a different drive or in cloud storage, and re-run the export once or twice a year so recent uploads are covered. If your videos matter to your work — a business page, a creator account, a community you run — an annual export costs you ten minutes of setup and protects years of material.
Finally, remember that an export of your own account may still contain other people's content: videos you were tagged in, or clips shared into your posts. Archiving them for yourself is fine; republishing them isn't automatically. Copyright and privacy follow the content, not the folder it ends up in.
