Facebook introduced stories in an attempt to replicate the popularity of the same feature that Snapchat has. Facebook’s user base is hardly the same as that of Snapchat so it’s no wonder that Facebook Stories aren’t as popular as they are on Snapchat. If you often post to your Facebook story, assuming the photo or video disappears after 24 hours, you might be surprised to learn that a copy of it is saved to your account. No one sees it however, it does exist. It’s not automatically deleted after the promised 24-hours. This all happens under the guise of a feature called Story Archive. If you don’t want to keep your Facebook stories forever, you should disable Facebook Story Archive.
Open the Facebook app and you will see stories at the top. You can cycle through the available stories but if you look at the top right of the story slider, you will see an option called ‘Your Archive’. Click it. If you’ve posted to your story recently, the Your Story Archive screen will show you your recent posts.
Tap the gear icon at the top right of this screen.
This will take you to the Story Archive Settings screen which is just one setting; the Save to Archive option. Turn it off and Facebook will no longer save a copy of your story to your account.
Facebook makes it a whole lot easier to enable this option than to disable it. Once you disable it, the screen gives you a button to enable it from the Your Story Archive screen.
If you remember, a few years ago it was discovered that even after you delete photos from Facebook, Facebook still kept a copy of them. People weren’t happy and Facebook was quick to abandon the practice. This obviously isn’t the same thing. You have the option to turn the feature off but it’s still unnecessary, and enabled by default.
The archive is only visible to you. Your friends and followers can’t see. In fact, if you wanted to make it available to them, you couldn’t. The story itself isn’t saved unless the 24-hours have expired. You can use an image or a video again or review it which is the utility of the feature. The saved stories don’t take up any space on your device. The copy is saved online so if you like the feature, you don’t have to worry about it taking up excessive space on your phone.
