Reddit Saved Posts and Comments: Backing up and searching through them Here's two ways to simply back up and search amongst your saved posts/comments in Reddit without any third party services or tools.

I started using Reddit a decade ago, and it has become my main social network and news feed as I’ve grown older and Facebook and other social networks come and go.

The simplicity of it being mostly text and images, the tailoring and categorization of topics in subreddits, the quality of the submissions and information shared by the community, and the unobtrusiveness of the experience (using third-party apps) is what makes it my favorite site.

While I love Reddit for the most parts, there’s a few things that still boggle my mind on how difficult it is to manage certain stuff: One of them is managing Custom Feeds (collections of subreddits so you can group them by topic), the other one is searching through my saved posts. We will be dealing with the latter in this post.

It looks like most information and tools found online are from 5 or even 10 years ago, so most of them stopped working ages ago. Other solutions involved setting up self-hosted servers in the cloud or signing up for third party services, which I think is overkill. Also, there’s something cool about keeping your Reddit anonymous to some extent, so the less we share our login information, identifiers and tokens with others the better.

Fortunately, I’ve found a couple ways to back up all your information in a human-readable non-proprietary form (JSON, XML and CSV).

Method 1: Using the RSS/JSON feed

From this URL reddit.com/prefs/feeds you can find RSS and JSON feeds to everything in your account, from your saved links (including comments and posts/submissions) to the latest feed on the front page, things you upvoted/downvoted or private messages and replies.

Cons of this method

The only drawback of this method is that it is limited. For example, Your Saved Links (saved posts) only provides the latest 24 items.

Pros of this method

On the bright side, in the JSON format you get tons of information on the post: subreddit, user info, image thumbnails in different sizes, upvote/downvote count, awards list…

This is the best way if you use a tool to sync them somewhere else, such as a Google Spreadsheet, Pocket, Zapier or IFTTT. Even a good ol’ RSS reader should work.

Method 2: Data Request

From this URL: reddit.com/settings/data-request you can request a full back up of everything in your account in CSV format.

You need to wait a little bit but I got mine in a few hours and it looks like this:

Cons of this method

Scarce information

The information in there is very succint, for the saved_posts.csv, you simply get ID and permalink information, something like this:

id,permalink
10z9vr8,https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/10z9vr8/someone_here_posted_a_map_of_earthquakes_since/
10xvgud,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/10xvgud/the_server_room_is_now_called_schrödingers_ac_unit/

Unsorted

Also, the items are sorted by ID, which have no chronological order so you have old and new items scrambled together.

Delay

You need to wait a few hours for your export, and can only ask for an export every 30 days:

It is nevertheless, a great way to periodically back up all your information without the need of any other tools.

Pros

You get all of them, in my case, I have more than 3000+ saved posts and got them all. Some forums and threads I read in the Internet said everything in Reddit was limited to 1000 items but I guess that information is outdated now.

You also get a ton of interesting files such as your subreddit subscriptions list, messages, chats, mod stuff, IP logs, etc.

Closing thoughts

So that’s two ways to easily search and make a copy on your Reddit saved posts. I will be downloading all my information every quarter or so, so I never lose all my saved stuff and can easily search its contents simply using my computer’s file explorer.