Many Facebook users are not aware that their data can be downloaded. That’s correct… Everything you’ve ever posted on your wall, your status messages, videos, photos and all the embarrassing revelations you’ve ever shared, can be sent to you in a tidy zip file.
Although, I’ve been off Facebook for over two months now, yesterday, I temporarily reactivated my account and clicked the link to request my downloaded data. In my case, about an hour and half passed before I received the following email from the Facebook team.

Your download is ready

You recently requested a download of your information on Facebook.

Your download has been generated and is now ready. Please follow the link below to download it. Remember that this file contains sensitive information. Because this download contains your profile information, you should keep it secure and take precautions when storing, sending or uploading it to any other services.

https://register.facebook.com/download/whateveryourdownloadidwillbe

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

I unpacked the zip file labelled “facebook-myname,” inside that, another folder labeled “myname” and in that, website structured content including three folders – html, photos, videos – an index.html file and a README file.
I opened the index file and was impressed – there it was… a clean version of my profile page, with navigation on the left linking to Wall, Photos, Videos, Friends and Messages!

STEPS TO DOWNLOAD YOUR FACEBOOK DATA

Log into your Facebook account

Go to Account Settings

Clicking on Download Your Information will get you here:

Wait for the email, click the download link, enter password, unzip and enjoy!

The downloaded data structure looks like this on a PC:

Here’s the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg:

Giving You More Control
by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 11:13am

The biggest problem in social networking is helping you easily interact with your friends and share information in lots of different contexts.

For example, you might want to share photos from a family vacation with just your family, send a video from a party to just the people who were there, invite coworkers to an office event, play a game with a few friends, or use a running website with your friends who like jogging.

We’ve long heard that people would find Facebook more useful if it were easier to connect with smaller groups of their friends instead of always sharing with everyone they know. For some it’s their immediate family and for others it’s their fantasy football league, but the common concern is always some variant of, “I’d share this thing, but I don’t want to bother 250 people. Or my grandmother. Or my boss.”

Until now, Facebook has made it easy to share with all of your friends or with everyone, but there hasn’t been a simple way to create and maintain a space for sharing with the small communities of people in your life, like your roommates, classmates, co-workers and family.

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