Your Twitter Archive: What It Contains, How to Get It, and How to Wipe It Clean

You joined Twitter a decade ago, posted thousands of times, liked everything that crossed your feed, and now you want a clean slate — or at least an honest look at the damage. The Twitter archive (now officially the X data archive) is the only way to see your full history, because the native profile only shows your last 3,200 tweets. Download it, unzip it, and you will find a detailed record of every embarrassing opinion, every cringe retweet, every DM you forgot you sent. The problem is that reading the archive is easy; deleting what it reveals is not. That is where X Cleaner comes in: a Chrome extension with a free plan that works through your logged-in X session, requires no API key, and deletes about one item per second.

What Exactly Is the Twitter Archive?

The Twitter archive is a personal data export that X (formerly Twitter) is legally required to provide under GDPR, CCPA, and similar privacy regulations. You request it from your account settings, and within 24 to 48 hours you receive a download link by email. The resulting ZIP file can range from small to several gigabytes depending on how long you have been active.

Inside the archive you will find:

• tweets.js — every original tweet you have ever posted, including date, text, media attachments, and engagement counts at the time of export
• like.js — every tweet you have ever liked, identified by tweet ID
• direct-messages.js — the full text of all DMs sent and received
• bookmark.js — every URL you have bookmarked
• follower.js and following.js — a full list of your social graph
• ad-engagements.js — a log of every ad you clicked or viewed, which is genuinely unsettling to read

The archive also includes a local HTML viewer. Open Your Archive.html in a browser and you get a navigable timeline, complete with media thumbnails. It is the most complete picture of your X activity you will ever get — and often the most motivating argument for a cleanup.

How to Request and Download Your Archive

The process is straightforward but involves a few steps that are easy to miss.

• Go to Settings and Support > Settings > Your Account > Download an archive of your data.
• Re-authenticate with your password (and 2FA if enabled).
• Click Request archive. X will begin compiling the file server-side.
• You will receive an email when it is ready — typically within 24 hours, sometimes longer for heavier accounts.
• Return to the same settings page, click Download archive, and save the ZIP.

A few things to know before you open the file:

The archive is a snapshot, not a live feed. It reflects your data at the moment of the request. If you post 50 more tweets while waiting, those will not appear. For an accurate count before a deletion run, request the archive, wait for it, and then act on it the same day.

The like.js file only contains tweet IDs, not the tweet text. You can still read your liked tweets in your own Likes tab (likes have been private to you since June 2024) — but the archive itself gives you only IDs. To audit your likes by content, you need to view them on-platform, not from the file.

The archive can be large. If you have been posting since 2009 and regularly share images or videos, expect a multi-gigabyte download. Set aside storage before you start.

Reading the Archive: What You Will Actually Find

Most people open their archive expecting a tidy list. What they get is a raw JavaScript data dump. Here is how to navigate it without losing your mind.

Use the built-in HTML viewer for casual browsing: open Your Archive.html, and you get a timeline sorted by year and month. You can search by keyword, filter by content type, and click through to media. It is slow on large accounts but functional.

For power users, the .js files inside the data/ folder are just JSON with a small variable assignment at the top. Strip the window.YTD.tweets.part0 = prefix and you have clean JSON. Pipe it through jq to filter, count, or export to CSV:

cat tweets.js | sed 's/window.YTD.tweets.part0 = //' | jq '.[].tweet.full_text' | wc -l

This will give you your exact tweet count — often higher than what you see on your profile, because deleted tweets still appear in the archive for a period after deletion.

Surprising things people find in their archive:

• Tweets from defunct third-party apps (Buffer, Hootsuite, IFTTT) that they forgot were connected
• Automated retweets from bots they once authorised
• Years of daily engagement with accounts they have since blocked
• DMs from 2011 that would read very differently today

The archive is honest in a way the live profile is not. It does not surface only your best content.

The Gap Between Your Archive and What You Can Delete

Here is the catch that catches everyone: the Twitter archive can show you 80,000 tweets stretching back to 2009, but X's API officially caps programmatic access at your last 3,200 tweets. Any tool that works through the API hits this wall hard. You see the history; you cannot touch most of it.

X Cleaner handles this in two ways. For your ~3,200 most recent tweets, it works through your logged-in X session, with no API key. For anything older, X Cleaner Pro imports your archive: it reads the file locally in your browser, without uploading it, and uses the tweet IDs to delete those older tweets at about one per second.

If you have a genuinely ancient account with 50,000+ tweets, the honest answer is that clearing everything takes multiple sessions. But X Cleaner Pro lets you filter by date range and content type, so you can target the oldest content first — exactly the stuff your archive just revealed.

For likes specifically, the situation is similar. Deleting your X likes through the native interface means clicking one by one. X Cleaner processes them in bulk while you do something else in another tab.

Using Your Archive as a Deletion Roadmap

The archive is not just a curiosity — it is the most effective audit tool you have before starting a cleanup. Here is a practical workflow.

Step 1: Count your total tweets. Use the jq command above or open the HTML viewer and look at the tweet count. This sets your baseline and tells you how many sessions you will need.

Step 2: Filter by date. Most people want to keep recent content and delete everything before a certain year. Open tweets.js and filter for entries where tweet.created_at is before your cutoff date. Count them. That is your deletion target.

Step 3: Spot content types to prioritise. Search your archive for keywords you would not want public today — old usernames you engaged with, topics that aged badly, automated posts from apps you no longer use. These are your first-pass targets.

Step 4: Launch X Cleaner with matching filters. Set the date range (Pro) to match what you found in the archive, choose the content types (tweets, retweets, replies), and let it run. At about one deletion per second, a 10,000-tweet backlog takes several hours, in one or more sessions.

If your main concern is old tweets specifically, bulk-deleting your tweets by date range is a direct path from archive audit to clean profile. No manual clicking, no API authentication, no third-party server ever seeing your X password.

Privacy and Security: What Happens to Your Archive File

Your archive ZIP contains some of the most sensitive data X holds about you. Handle it accordingly.

The file stays on your machine. X does not keep a copy available indefinitely — the download link expires after a few days. If you want to reference it later, keep your own copy in an encrypted folder or delete it once you have finished your audit.

Never upload it to a third-party service. A surprising number of "tweet analysis" tools online ask you to upload your archive for processing. Every one of those tools then has access to your full DM history, your ad engagement data, your follower graph, and your complete post history. There is no reason to hand that to an unknown server.

X Cleaner works within your browser tab, through your logged-in X session: your X password and session never leave your browser, and your content is never sent to our servers (we only keep what's needed to run your license; see our privacy policy). If you use the Pro archive import, the file is read locally in your browser and never uploaded.

What about old DMs? DMs are the one area where even a browser-based tool has limits. X does not expose a native bulk-DM-delete interface, so the process is slower. But your archive at least gives you a complete inventory of every conversation, including with accounts that have since been suspended — conversations you might not even remember having.

How Long Does a Full Cleanup Actually Take?

Here are rough estimates. X Cleaner works at about one item per second, with automatic pauses when X rate-limits, so:

• A few hundred tweets: a few minutes
• A few thousand tweets: about an hour
• 10,000 tweets: several hours, in one or more sessions
• 50,000 tweets or 100,000 likes: many sessions over several days (older tweets via the Pro archive import)

You do not need to babysit the process. Start a deletion run, put your laptop aside, and check back later. X Cleaner runs in the background as long as the browser tab stays open.

The realistic bottleneck for large accounts is not the tool — it is X's own rate limiting. If you push too hard too fast, X will slow down responses from their servers. X Cleaner handles this gracefully by detecting rate limits and pausing automatically rather than throwing errors.

For retweets, which are often the noisiest part of an old timeline, the same logic applies. Removing your retweets in bulk follows the same session-based process: filter, launch, let it run. An account that retweeted aggressively for five years might have 15,000 to 30,000 retweets — many hours of processing, spread over several sessions.

The bottom line: your archive tells you the scale of the job. X Cleaner does the job. The combination of the two is a complete cleanup workflow that does not require you to click for days or hand your credentials to a third-party API.

Frequently asked questions