Thanks to Rev. Nate Melcher for assembling this information and the related action steps:

Facebook Live videos will be deleted soon. If your church livestreams worship via Facebook, or you had a live video showcasing an outreach ministry or community event, they will all be gone by May 31, 2025, if not sooner. If this will impact your ministry or your personal Facebook profile, here are three actions to take.

  1. Take a big breath. You didn’t ask for this company to suddenly change its policies and create more work for you. God loves you.
  2. Follow these instructions, using a trusted Mac or PC workstation with plenty of memory and a solid Internet connection (wired, if possible), and a quality external hard drive (see note below).
  3. With pastoral care, explain to your church what is happening and how it will impact them, including whether you’re moving worship to a dedicated video platform instead (YouTube, Vimeo, your own website, etc.), and how to access and share it.

Richfield UMC backs up every worship service  in two places: on the livestream workstation tech booth and an 8TB external hard drive (and should also backup at least one more time, either in another drive and/or our cloud storage we’re paying for). For perspective, storing the ~275 worship services the church has had since March 2020 is 425 GB. Including every worship event promo, stewardship video, Sunday School video, etc. and the footage/projects to produce the final videos, the combined total of the church’s video archives is 1.5 TB. Opinions vary about whether to use an HDD or SSD drive for long-term storage, but if you just need to get going ASAP, you can pick up a quality 8TB HDD for well under $175, while a 4TB SSD is nearly $300. You can get four times the storage with 2 8TB HDDs for the same price and get 2x redundancy. You can then consider if you want to upload archives to a dedicated video platform, your website, etc.

Again, please remember to breathe. You’re doing good ministry that deserves to be archived and preserved. You and your team have got this.