You have probably saved thousands of posts on Instagram over the years. Recipes, workouts, places you meant to visit, work you wanted to come back to. They sit behind a bookmark icon in an app you do not control, and they quietly disappear whenever the original creator deletes a post or switches their account to private.
This guide walks you through backing up that collection to a folder on your own computer, in two parts: requesting your official Instagram data export, then turning that export into a real archive with UnplugMe.
What Instagram actually gives you
Instagram's Download Your Information feature is the official, supported way to get a copy of your account data. It is built into the product, it is user-initiated, and it is exactly what it sounds like.
What lands in your inbox a few hours later is a ZIP file. Inside it is JSON — structured text describing your account:
- Every post you have saved, and the collection each one belongs to
- Every post you have liked
- Every reel, story, and post you published yourself
- Your followers and following lists
- Your messages, comments, and search history
Here is roughly what a saved post looks like inside that file:
{
"title": "recipes",
"string_map_data": {
"Saved on": {
"href": "https://www.instagram.com/p/CxAmPlEp0sT/",
"timestamp": 1719763200
}
}
}Notice what is not there: the photo. The export contains a href — a link that points at the post. The media itself still lives on Instagram's servers.
Your data export is a list, not an album. It tells you what you saved and when. It does not hand you the pictures.
That gap is the whole problem. A link to a post you saved in 2019 is worth very little if the post is gone, and links in the export eventually stop resolving.
Part 1: Request your data export
This part happens entirely on Instagram. Nothing else is involved.
- Open instagram.com in your browser and sign in to the account you want to back up.
- Open Settings, then Accounts Center at the top of the panel.
- Go to Your information and permissions, then Download your information.
- Choose Download or transfer information, then pick the Instagram account you are archiving.
- Select All available information — or tick just Likes, Saved, and Your posts if you want a smaller file.
- Choose Download to device.
- Set the format to JSON, the date range to All time, and media quality to High.
- Click Create files and wait for the email.
The one setting people get wrong
Format must be JSON, not HTML. The HTML option produces a browsable web page that is pleasant to click through and useless to any tool that needs to read it back. If you pick HTML, you will have to request the whole thing again.
Instagram usually emails you within a few hours. Large accounts can take up to 48 hours, and very large accounts sometimes arrive split across several numbered ZIP files. All of the parts are valid — keep them together.
For the full walkthrough with screenshots, see our Instagram data export guide.
Part 2: Turn the export into an actual archive
Once the ZIP arrives, UnplugMe reads it in your browser and resolves each of those links back into the photo or video it points at, then downloads them to your hard drive.
A few things worth knowing about how this works:
- The ZIP never leaves your computer. It is parsed locally, in the browser tab. There is no upload step, because there is no server to upload it to.
- It runs in your own session. You are signed in to your own account, downloading posts you already had access to. UnplugMe does not reach for anything you could not open yourself by clicking the bookmark icon.
- Your first 50 downloads are free. No account, no card. Enough to see whether it does what you want before you pay anything.
- The output is folders, not a database. Your collections become directories. Your saves, likes, and favorites stay separate.
What you will and will not get back
Be realistic about the ceiling here. Posts deleted by their original creator are gone — no tool can recover them. Accounts that have since gone private will not resolve. Some older media links have already expired on Instagram's side.
In practice most of a saved collection comes back intact, and the pieces that do not are almost always ones that vanished years ago without you noticing. That is precisely the argument for doing this sooner rather than later.
A note on what you are keeping
The posts in your saved folder were mostly made by other people. Backing them up for your own reference is a personal archive, the same as a bookmarks file or a scrapbook — but the content still belongs to the creators who made it. Keep it for yourself; do not republish it as your own.
What is unambiguously yours is your own account data: your posts, your likes, your collections, the record of what you found worth keeping. That is the part no platform should be the only custodian of.
Get started
Request the export today — the waiting is the slow part, and it costs you nothing to start the clock. When the email arrives, you will be ready.