Starting a social media account is a lot easier than deleting one. However, if you have decided to break up with Twitter, what’s the best way to do so?

That’s the question that cybersecurity company Kaspersky recently addressed noting that there are a number of reasons why users may be inclined to cut the cord. These range from having to contend with an unstable political situation, the need to protect one’s personal information, to simply acting on the desire to reclaim one’s time to spend on other pursuits.

The worst thing you can do according to the cybersecurity company? Just abandon your account, leaving it open to hackers to do as they please.

Kaspersky noted that further complicating matters, and compelling users to stay on the social media network, is the fear that leaving twitter for good means that you may not be able to recover their photos of cherished memories.

So what’s the best way to break up but minimize your losses ? Users can do the following to deactivate their Twitter profile, but retain the memories:

• Go to twitter.com and log in to your account.
• Click on your profile avatar in the top right corner, and in the drop-down menu select Settings and Privacy.
• From the menu on the left, select Account, scroll down, and click the Request your archive button, which you’ll find by “Your Tweet archive.”

A ZIP archive will then be created and sent to your e-mail address. It will include a list of tweets sorted by month, along with a graph of the user’s Twitter activity.

Going one step further is just deleting one’s account permanently. While  the user’s data won’t be deleted from Twitter’s servers and will be used for any purpose stated in the user agreement, the account will become unreachable on twitter.com; nobody outside the company will be able to see it.

Admittedly, leaving such a populous social media network may sound unthinkable at present to many, particularly those who use it for work purposes. However, as we move towards a world in which everything is digitized, you can expect that managing your digital identity, and keeping your virtual persona safe, to be a concern you will likely need to revisit time and again and in the future.