Import Facebook Messenger

What you need

A Facebook data export containing your messages (JSON format).

How to export from Messenger

1. Go to facebook.com/dyi (Download Your Information)
2. Click Request a download
3. Under Select types of information, check only Messages
4. Set the format to JSON and quality to Low (media quality doesn't matter for text)
5. Choose a Date range if you only want a specific period
6. Click Request a download
7. Wait for the email from Meta (usually a few hours, can take up to 24h)
8. Download the archive and unzip it on your Mac

Your messages are in your_activity_across_facebook/messages/inbox/. Each conversation has its own folder.

How to import into Retrace

1. Open Retrace and go to Settings
2. Click the Data Sources tab
3. Click the Messenger card
4. Select the inbox folder from your extracted archive
5. Review the conversations found in the preview
6. Link participants to people in your address book (or create new ones)
7. Click Import

What gets imported

• All messages with timestamps and sender names
• Group chat participants
• Conversation metadata (reactions, message type)

Common issues

• Export takes a long time: Meta can take anywhere from a few hours to 24 hours to prepare your archive. Check your email for the download link.
• Character encoding: Messenger exports use escaped UTF-8 characters for non-ASCII names. The parser decodes these automatically.
• Multiple JSON files per conversation: Long conversations are split across message_1.json, message_2.json, etc. The parser merges them.
• Re-importing: Safe to do. Retrace deduplicates messages automatically.