Is Instagram follower data limited to 365 days?
What an 8-year export actually contains

CheckMate operator · Published 2026-09-02 · Data: export requested 2026-08-18 · Sample: the operator's own account, one account only

You will often read that the followers file in an Instagram data export only covers the last year. If you use an unfollower checker, that matters a lot: if someone who unfollowed you a year ago is simply missing from the file, no tool on earth can find them. So I opened a real export and counted. The short version: this account's file went all the way back eight years.

How I counted, so you can repeat it

In the Instagram app I went to Settings → Accounts Center → Your information and permissions → Download your information and requested date range "All time", format JSON. From the ZIP I opened connections/followers_and_following/followers_1.json, pulled string_list_data[0].timestamp (unix seconds) from each entry, and grouped by year. It is three lines of Python.

import json, datetime, collections
d = json.load(open('followers_1.json'))
ts = [s['timestamp'] for it in d for s in it['string_list_data']]
print(collections.Counter(datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(t).year for t in ts))
print(min(ts), max(ts))  # 1541142426 → 2018-11-02

Uploading the ZIP to CheckMate shows the same values: the "observed range" on the results screen is exactly this min-to-max timestamp span. Because the analysis runs entirely in your browser and the file never leaves it, the script above is the better option if you want to verify the numbers yourself.

Year-by-year distribution: a shape a 365-day cap cannot produce

If a 365-day cap were really in effect, no timestamp before August 2025 could exist in the file. Here is what the file actually contains.

All nine years from 2018 to 2026 are populated, and the busiest years are 2022 (104) and 2024 (142). Only 74 entries fall inside the last 365 days (on or after 2025-08-14); the remaining 469 (86.4%) are older than that. For this file at least, "only the last year is included" is simply not true.

So where does the 365-day story come from?

It is not baseless. Community threads (Reddit r/Instagram among others) have repeatedly reported a date-range notice attached to the followers item on Meta's download screen, depending on the account and the time of the request, and some users genuinely received files covering only a short window. The accurate way to put it is this:

• If you do not pick "All time" when requesting the download, you get a short file. This is by far the most common cause.
• Meta does not document the export's coverage anywhere official, and it may vary by account and by when you ask.
• So neither "it is always complete" nor "it is always 365 days" can be stated as fact. The only thing you can trust is the timestamp range inside the file you received.

This is why CheckMate does not assume any fixed coverage on the results screen and instead shows the range observed in your file. The same behaviour held for the 613 MB file examined in the ZIP structure teardown (2,794 days observed) and for this file (2,842 days).

What this means for unfollower checks

1. "You can't catch unfollows from a year ago" may be wrong

With an all-time file, old relationships are part of the comparison. This account has 52 unfollowers (accounts I follow that do not follow me back). Grouped by the year I followed them: 2020: 1, 2021: 2, 2022: 4, 2023: 5, 2024: 16, 2025: 15, 2026: 9. More than half were one-sided follows that had lasted over two years. A short file would have dropped all of those older entries at once.

2. You can tell for yourself whether your file was truncated

If your follower count is far off the number on your profile, or the observed range is much shorter than the age of your account, the file is probably not an all-time export. Running an unfollower check on it will misclassify "not in the file" as "unfollowed you". Request the download again with the date range set to "All time" first.

Limits of this measurement

Related reading