Somewhere on your phone there's a network holding the only copy of your kid's first birthday, the trip with the friend who passed, the photos from the house you don't live in anymore. You didn't decide that. It just accumulated there.
And that network can lock the door. Disabled account, hacked and recovered by someone else, a two-factor phone number you no longer have, a classifier that flagged a joke. People lose a decade of pictures every day over nothing, and there's no one to call.
This is the habit that makes that impossible, and how to do it on each network.
The habit
Once a quarter, export everything from every network you use, and put it somewhere you control: a drive at home, a cloud account that's only for backups, both. Set a reminder. It takes twenty minutes four times a year.
The export is only half of it. The other half is never letting a network be the only copy going forward. Photos you care about go to your own storage first and get posted second.
Settings → Your information → Download your information. Pick Photos and videos, Posts, Messages, whatever matters. Choose high quality and a date range. Facebook emails a link to a zip, sometimes within an hour, sometimes a day. Download it, open it to make sure the photos are actually inside, then store it.
Do this before you ever need it. A disabled account can't be exported.
Through the Accounts Center: Your information and permissions → Download your information. Same idea, same zip, and it includes stories, reels and messages. Original quality matters here; Instagram's compressed copies are not the files you took.
iCloud and Google Photos
Not social networks, but the same lesson. A locked Apple ID or a suspended Google account takes the photos with it. Both let you download your library in full: Apple through privacy.apple.com, Google through Takeout. Keep a second copy of the library somewhere that isn't the same company.
Messages
Group chats are where the photos your friends took of you live. WhatsApp exports a chat with media from the chat's menu. iMessage doesn't export cleanly; a Mac backup is the practical route. Save the ones that matter rather than trying to archive everything.
How POINT handles it
We think the export should be a button, not a request.
In Settings, under Privacy, Download your data produces a file immediately with everything you've put on POINT: your account details, your Space, every post with links to the full-size media, comments, reactions, friends, who you follow, groups, events, albums, messages and saved posts. You can run it as often as you like.
The same page has Delete account, which you can do yourself, with your password, no email to support. Your account closes immediately and the data is gone from backups within thirty days.
Nothing you post on POINT is held hostage, and nothing about your account standing changes your ability to take your things with you. That's deliberate: a network that makes leaving hard is telling you something about why it wants you to stay.
Do it now
Open whichever app holds the most of your life and start the export before you close this page. If it takes a day to arrive, fine. The version of you that gets locked out next year will be grateful.