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Archiving

Save a Page's whole feed as a browsable, incremental tree of Markdown files: one file per post with its comments, indexed by month.

archive turns a Page into a folder of Markdown you can read, grep, or commit to git. Each post becomes its own file, comments are embedded inline, and a generated README.md indexes everything by month. The archive is incremental: re-running only fetches posts that are not already on disk, so you can keep a Page mirrored over time with the same command.

A first archive

fb archive aivietnam.edu.vn --comments

By default the tree is written under ~/data/<page>. Point --out somewhere else to choose the root:

fb archive nasa --out ~/archives -n 100 --comments

The layout is browsable on disk and on any git host:

~/data/aivietnam.edu.vn/
  README.md                              index, grouped by year and month
  index.json                             state used for incremental runs
  2025/
    11/
      2025-11-03_khoa-hoc-ai-mien-phi.md one file per post, with its comments
      2025-11-01_thong-bao-tuyen-sinh.md
    10/
      ...

Each post file carries its title, date and engagement counts, a link back to Facebook, the post text, images, external links, and the full comment thread. Post slugs are transliterated to ASCII, so Vietnamese (and other accented) titles produce clean file names.

Comments and replies

--comments is on by default and embeds each post's comment thread under a ## Comments heading. Add --replies to walk the reply threads too; replies are indented under the comment they answer:

fb archive aivietnam.edu.vn --replies

Turn comments off for a faster, text-only archive:

fb archive aivietnam.edu.vn --comments=false

Incremental runs

The archive remembers what it has already saved in index.json. On the next run, any post whose Markdown file is still on disk is skipped, and only new posts are fetched and written:

# first run: pulls the recent feed
fb archive aivietnam.edu.vn

# a week later: only the new posts are fetched, README is regenerated
fb archive aivietnam.edu.vn

The index file and each post are written as the crawl proceeds, so an interrupted run loses nothing: re-running picks up exactly where it stopped.

Pass --force to re-fetch and overwrite posts that are already archived, for example to refresh engagement counts or pull newly added comments:

fb archive aivietnam.edu.vn --force

Bounding the crawl

The same global flags that bound a feed apply here:

fb archive nasa -n 50                 # at most 50 posts
fb archive nasa --since 2025-01-01    # stop once posts get older than this

What gets archived

fb archive reads the public crawler surface, so it works on any public Page with no login:

fb archive aivietnam.edu.vn --comments

The same surface sets the ceiling on depth. An archive captures the most recent posts a Page exposes rather than its entire history, and each post's preview comments rather than the full thread. Re-running picks up new posts incrementally and skips the ones already on disk. See [how fb reads Facebook]({{< relref "authentication.md" >}}) for the details.

3 min read