# How to See Twitter History > Your posting history is scattered across the app, search and the archive export. How to reach each one, and which is the only complete record. - Source: https://tweetsweep.com/blog/how-to-see-twitter-history - Published: 2025-03-23 - Updated: 2026-08-16 - Reading time: 5 min --- ## Profile tabs in the app Open your own profile. In phone tap your photo in the upper left and then the profile row. On your desktop site, click on your avatar (picture) or the Profile item in the sidebar (to the left). You get access to four tabs Posts, Replies, Highlights and Media. Posts contain original tweets and quote posts which remain on the account (newest first). Replies stores each public comment you made on someone else's post. Highlights is merely the content you decided to display. Media refers to the subset of posts with an image, video or GIF. Scroll. The app requests older pages until it cannot anymore. For long enough accounts that stop is well before the first tweet from the year you signed up. There is no message. The spinner just never returns. If you are attempting to consume all that content on the screen you already inhabit that is the first wall. Each tab is a separate list. Clearing Media does not modify Posts. Exhausting Replies also refuses to load older originals. Then scroll already gave up and a post from 2016 will not show here ## Likes bookmarks and lists Likes are their own tab on the same profile. Only you can open it. The list is sorted with the newest first and it stops after some scrolling. This is an easy tab to forget the length of because other people never see it. Bookmarks sit beneath the bookmark icon in the left-hand sidebar on desktop, and under the menu on iOS and Android. Under the same menu are Lists, your lists. Over in Settings and privacy, clear inside Privacy and safety, you will see Muted accounts, Blocked accounts and Muted words. Each of those screens is a live snapshot of the present. They are not a record one-year at a time. The Followers and Following scores on your profile reveal the individuals making real-time contact with you. They do not help you reconstruct who you followed in 2018. The app will not plot that older graph if you require it. ## The archive request The full record: The data store. On desktop select More from the left sidebar, then Settings and privacy—it will show up in your account box now—and select Your account > Download an archive of your data. In your phone, open the sidebar menu, go to Settings and privacy, then perform the same two actions. X asks for your password. Verify and tap on submit request. The browser does not start downloading the file X creates it on their end and notifies you by email when it is done. For the waiting period, it takes a couple of hours usually. This can take close to a day on a larger account. The email account that is associated with the account Request once and leave it. You may re-archive later. The contents of each file was what still existed at request time. The next ZIP will not restore any posts you have already deleted. ## The ZIP and the index page The email includes a download link. Download the ZIP onto your machine and extract it. Included is an offline browser and some JavaScript data files. Open the index-page included to Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge It is a local page. It reads these files beside it. It does not re-upload your posts to X. On the index page, there is a sidebar of categories: posts, likes, direct messages and everything else. Click a category to display that slice Use the search box. Enter a word, a handle, or part of a date and the page filters against local files. It is the same record that X holds. That is a short version of the four profile tabs. The archive is not trimmed right there, so posts that the app will no more digg into are situated here in this directory. ## Posts beyond the app scroll If the account is lengthy, the on-screen timeline will not trace back to when you signed up. The archive does. Navigate years the mobile app refused to load Open Posts from the index archive page It keeps posts that remained present at the moment you hit request: replies, retweets, and quote. It is easy to tell, if you joined several years ago and posted regularly. The profile tab collapses in the middle. The archive continues. That gap is why you would ask for the file instead of just forcing another scroll. The app will not go farther. In this ZIP file media is referenced by filename in the archive. Local viewer still shows files hosted on X If the media had already been removed you might get a reference without the visual itself. ## Messages logins and ad interests The archive does not solely cover posts. Older conversations from direct messages, which the in-app search doesn't surface quickly, show up as threads. The follower and following lists in the file are the lists as of when X created the archive. They are a snapshot, not every follow and unfollow (good or bad) in line form. Login history is the times and clients Ad engagements, and any interests that X inferred from you are in dedicated sections. Those interests are things the ads system gave you, not something you listed on a form. It is the most salient thing you can have saved on the account. It is free of charge except for the waiting. ## Phone screens and desktop files The archive request can be initiated from the phone. It is difficult to read comfortably on the phone. The ZIP is a desktop object. To use it, you download it to your laptop, unzip and open the index page on a screen that accommodates the sidebar and search field. Live browsing of the four profile tabs, Likes and Bookmarks both on phone and desktop. The desktop site at x.com scrolls further before it becomes sluggish, but it's stuck behind the same wall as the apps. It does not replace the archive. If you only have a phone, ask for the file anyway and view the ZIP on whatever computer you can be at for an hour. The index page is a HTML and JS based static site. Nothing needs to be installed. ## Cleanup from the archive That the majority of people are seeking this history in order to decide what they want to hold on to. The honest pass is the work of scrolling through it all in the archive browser reading over a decade of posts. The same forall the week; only now you see the rotten jokes, the responses, and the views whose name I should have forgotten in some order of release. That read is done by you in a tab on your machine, not his public profile. TweetSweep uses the same archive file, organizes your posting history into a big calendar, and allows you to delete records on day by month basis. Instead of relying on the app's partial scroll plus a second guess, the review and the cleanup use one source of truth. Once you have crawled the index page, load up TweetSweep with the ZIP and select the spans you want to go. The calendar is the map. The data is a file you are already waiting on.