How to search through and backup your Tweets

One of our staff recently needed to search through their Twitter timeline to find some old tweets. Can you believe that Twitter doesn't have a way to search your own Tweet history?

Here is how we managed to search through his Tweets and create a backup of his entire Twitter history.

It took a lot of Googling, and a lot of signing up for free trials of Twitter related services that promised extra features but still couldn't search a timeline. In the end we found a great little Java-based Twitter backup program here.

We hope writing this article helps you find the solution faster than we did.

Johann Burkard had a similar frustration with Twitter and went ahead and solved it himself. His little Java program asks you for your Twitter account details and then proceeds to download your entire history to an XML file. It has been suggested that it is limited to 3200 Tweets owing to Twitter not keeping more than that in its history. We haven't tested such a large Twitter account.

The XML file it creates is not easily readable by a human, but running this command on a Mac or Linux (or Windows with Cygwin) console gave use exactly what we wanted:

We now have a complete backup list of every Tweet and could easily search it with a text browser for the Tweets we were looking for.