How to back-up your Facebook account

We’ve heard stories in
the news or from friends of social media accounts being hacked, and we feel
confident that our passwords are strong enough, or that no hacker would be
interested in hacking our Facebook accounts. But you’d be very surprised just
how easy it is for anyone to actually guess your password.

Tell me if I’m getting
warmer. Birth-dates, names of children, names of pets, an amalgamation of
siblings / children’s names, favorite song title, favorite celebrity, the list
goes on and on. What’s worse is that the majority of us actually use the same password
for all our social media accounts, emails, blogs and, in the case of numeric
passwords, ATM pin codes. If your password belongs to any of the categories I
mentioned earlier, imagine how it would be for someone whose sole intent is to
break into your account to do so with relative ease?

Social media influencers
and brands that use Facebook to connect with their fans and users stand the
most to lose if their account was hacked. If their social media accounts are
compromised, it would mean restarting their entire social media identity,
repopulating their account with content, and uploading hundreds or thousands of
photos and albums all over again. That’s not only time-consuming, but also
potential loss of income or revenue.

Do I have your attention
now? Good. Because there are ways to make sure that your account is
sufficiently protected against hackers.

Use a mixture of upper
and lower cases, numbers, and throw in a few symbols if your email service
provider allows it in the address. You should also change / rotate your
passwords at least once every 3 to 6-months, just to play it safe.

In 2011, Facebook
introduced Login Approvals, a two-factor authentication feature that sends
you a notification on your smartphone if you or someone else is attempting to
log-in to your account. If the log-in attempt was not by you, you can choose to
deny access and change your password immediately. If the log-in attempt was requested by you, you will be
presented with a numeric code, which you can use to gain access to your
Facebook account.

Say for example you want to
delete your account and start a new one, or simply because you wish to quit
Facebook for good but wish to preserve your activities offline. Facebook has a way for
you to do that too. Simply go to your Settings, followed by General Account Settings and click on Download a copy of my Facebook data,
and then click on Start My Archive.
This enables you to download your Facebook account and store it offline,
hopefully somewhere safe. Thing is though, you will be downloading your entire
Facebook account, currently this method doesn’t allow you to choose what
specific data you wish to preserve, say for example photos and likes only, or
starting from a specific time, say May 2016.

Apart from backing up
your data and preventing ransomware attacks, the Acronis True Image 2017 New
Generation also features the Social Networks Backup for your Facebook account.

Once a backup schedule is
set, Acronis True Image 2017 New Generation will perform backups of your
account incrementally and automatically. So if your account was accidentally
deleted, hacked, or if you wish to terminate your account, your Facebook data
will always be up to date and safely kept in storage.

The Acronis
True Image 2017 New Generation is available now in
Asia.