Snapchat rankled a few of its most loyal (and heavy) customers when it introduced final week it is going to start charging for storage plans for Recollections, its model of a digital archive for Snaps and tales.
Although the Santa Monica, California-based social media firm promised that “nothing will change” for the overwhelming majority of Snapchatters, who’ve lower than 5 gigabytes (GB) of Recollections, it is going to start rolling out paid storage plans at a but undisclosed date.
A Snapchat spokesperson instructed Quick Firm {that a} 100 GB storage plan will price $1.99 per 30 days, with costs various by market and native forex. The corporate additionally instructed TechCrunch that plans will vary as much as $15.99 per 30 days, relying on the quantity of information of Recollections. The corporate indicated you might have 1000’s of Snaps saved earlier than you’re bumped right into a paid plan.
However there’s a work-around: You’ll be able to obtain your data at no cost. Right here’s what you should know if you wish to obtain your Snapchat knowledge.
Tips on how to save your Snapchat Recollections
The recognition of the Recollections function, which was launched by Snapchat in 2016, will now come at a price. The corporate mentioned that customers have saved greater than 1 trillion Recollections since 2016, which is why it’s rolling out the storage plans.
“It’s by no means straightforward to transition from receiving a service at no cost to paying for it, however we hope the worth we offer with Recollections is value the fee,” the corporate mentioned in a blog post final week.
Whereas Snapchat will present 12 months of non permanent Recollections storage for any Recollections that exceed the 5GB storage restrict, it hasn’t specified when that free interval will start.
That’s why you might need to be proactive if you happen to actually need to grasp onto some Recollections and obtain them to your machine now.
Fortunately, that’s actually simply completed. After opening the Snapchat app, navigate to the Recollections part, then select “choose” on the prime of the web page, and choose as much as 100 Recollections at a time that you just need to export. Then choose a vacation spot and faucet “obtain.”
In case you have greater than 100 Recollections, you’ll have to repeat this course of.
Tips on how to save your Snapchat knowledge
If you wish to squirrel away extra knowledge than your Recollections, Snapchat is required by legal guidelines in varied jurisdictions to permit its customers to obtain their private knowledge—which is true of different social media platforms, as nicely.
In the event you’ve by no means downloaded one of these knowledge prior to now, a slight caveat: Relying on what info you’re after and the way energetic a Snapchatter you’ve been, you might be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information at your disposal.
Whilst you might go for the kitchen sink method and obtain every part you may, these information might embrace trivia you don’t care about (like your login and search histories), together with extra sentimental info you seemingly do care about (like your Recollections and saved chat historical past). The excellent news is, you can too choose the precise classes of information you need to obtain.
Snapchat doesn’t present all your info in a single neat file—quite, you’ll obtain a zipper file—so that you’ll need to make sure you will have ample storage for the info.
Right here’s the step-by-step process to obtain no matter Snapchat knowledge you fancy:
- Open the Snapchat app, go to your profile and navigate to the “settings” icon
- Scroll to pick “My Information”
- Choose the precise you need to embrace in your knowledge obtain
- Specify a selected knowledge vary of information you’d wish to obtain or obtain all obtainable knowledge
- Verify the e-mail tackle the place you’d wish to be notified
- Click on “submit” to formally submit your knowledge request
As soon as your knowledge is able to be downloaded, you’ll obtain an e-mail from Snapchat with a hyperlink the place you may entry your info.
As the corporate notes, “this course of can take time to finish,” which customers report can vary from a number of hours to a number of weeks.
Griping about Snap’s plan
What Snapchat is doing, in essence, is transferring the price of storage over to customers.
Obtain all these Recollections onto your iPhone, for instance, and that may simply ratchet up the quantity of information you will have saved in your iCloud. Almost two-thirds of Apple prospects paid for iCloud storage in 2024, making it Apple’s hottest paid service, based on CIRP data.
However in contrast to a few of its rivals, together with Instagram and TikTok, Snapchat is testing the waters of whether or not its customers are keen to pay for storing social media posts.
As folks have lamented on-line, this can be the way forward for all social media platforms, or simply one other instance of so-called subscription creep, through which we’re all paying for increasingly subscriptions for issues that when have been free.
However irrespective of their gripe, some folks see these types of strikes by social media giants as an excuse to bail.
“Now give me explanation why I ought to proceed utilizing Snapchat in 2025,” one individual wrote on Reddit. “Oh wait, there aren’t any besides my mates.”
Added one other person on a distinct subreddit: “It could be a disgrace if we simply deleted social media.”
