Most of the work of a social account — the photos, the words, the order — sits on a platform’s servers, under a licence you accepted without reading. Accounts get restricted by mistake. Logins get lost. A network changes what it allows. It does not happen often, but it happens to somebody every week, and it is much worse when the only copy was there.
What to keep
- The original files: the full-size photos, and the video before it was compressed.
- The captions, in a plain document or spreadsheet, with the date each one went out.
- The numbers you care about. A monthly note of reach and followers is enough.
- The list of your accounts, and where each login and recovery email lives.
How, without making it a project
- 1Keep everything in one folder per account, named by date. The folder is the backup; the platform is the copy.
- 2When you schedule a post, the files and the caption already exist on your side — do not delete them afterwards.
- 3Once a month, copy the folder somewhere else: another drive, another cloud account.
- 4Request each network’s own data download now and then. It is slow and incomplete, but it is free, and it shows what the network considers yours.
What a scheduler is, and is not
A scheduler holds your queue, not your archive. Treat it as a way to publish, and keep the source of truth in your own folder. If a tool changes, closes or loses a connection, your work should not depend on it.
The test: if this account vanished tonight, could you post the same things from somewhere else tomorrow? If not, start with the originals.