How to delete your Snapchat account while preserving your data

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Snapchat developers were recently accused of breach of privacy after some employees’ privacy abuses came to light. In essence, they spied on users. Not a pleasant discovery, is it? It might even make one think about leaving the social network.

It doesn’t really matter what prompts the idea, though — could be excessive attention from strangers, a commitment to defeat Internet addiction, or your 25th birthday. We are just going to tell you how to do it.

Saving data from Snapchat

Before you delete your Snapchat account, you will probably want to save the photos and videos you had so much fun sharing — and maybe also some other information related to your activities in the social network. Unfortunately, Snapchat doesn’t offer a way to download everything in one go. Here, instead, we check out the options it does provide.

1. Setting up snap and story backup

By default, Snapchat does not save your photos and videos. A snap you send to your friend will disappear as soon as your friend has seen it. If you publish a story, it will be deleted in 24 hours. There is no way to restore them later.

If you’re toying with the idea of leaving the social network, you might want copies of your available posts. For that, set up Memories — a function letting you save snaps to your device (Camera Roll) or cloud (Memories):

* Open your profile and press the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

* Go to Features (Android) or My account and select Memories.

* Locate Save destinations.

* For the Save Button option, set the location for your saved snaps. To keep copies of your videos and photos on your device, select Memories & Camera Roll, or opt for Camera Roll Only if you do not want your data to be saved to the cloud.

* For My Story Posts option, select Memories. This setting will spare you the need to save each post manually.

As for your personal chats, you will have to press Save each time you send a snap you want to keep.

2. Downloading photos and videos from Memories

If you want to leave Snapchat right away, but until now have been saving snaps only to Memories, download your favorite pics to your device. The iOS app does it in one go.

* Enter Memories.
* Press on a check in the upper right-hand corner.
* Highlight the snaps you want to download.
* Press the arrow icon at the bottom of the screen.
* Select Save.

Android users have to download snaps one by one.

* Enter Memories.
* Press the pic to download.
* Select Export Snap.
* Press Camera Roll.

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