<aside> <img src="/icons/book-closed_blue.svg" alt="/icons/book-closed_blue.svg" width="40px" /> MuckRock’s User Guide gives you everything to make the most out of MuckRock’s suite of tools. If this has helped you, consider donating to support our work!

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Whether you’re planning to delete your account or you just want to make sure you have a complete copy of the records related to your MuckRock request, the following instructions will help you generate a complete back up of any request on MuckRock.

Backing up your Request

• Start by opening the request and looking for the “Download as Zip” button

• Depending on the size of the request, it may take up to 30 minutes to arrive in your inbox. Look for an email with a subject line of “Your zip archive of your request.”

• If you haven’t received it after an hour, check any “spam” or “junk” folders, and confirm that you are looking at the right email account.

Where will we send the link?

If you have multiple email addresses associated with your MuckRock account, we’ll always send the Download link to the “Primary” email address. To find that you’ll need to …

Look for the “Your Account” link under your name, at the top right. There’s also a “Your Profile” option, but that won’t help you here. Select “Your Account”.

From your MuckRock Accounts profile, you’ll want to select “Edit Profile”. This is where you can access some basic account settings.

From there you’ll select the “Edit Email” option. This will show you all the email addresses that we have associated with your account.

You can use this screen to add another email address to your account or indicate a different “primary” address.

If there is more than one email address shown there, make sure you’re checking the account that is tagged as “Primary”

Deleting a Request

If you need help redacting sensitive information that should not have been included in responsive material, use the “Get Help” button on your request to let us know — we are always happy to help redact personally identifying information.

If you know you want to remove your request from MuckRock entirely, you can use the “Delete Request” button to do exactly that. You’ll have an opportunity to leave a note explaining why you removed the request and it will be scrubbed from our systems.

Making Requests Private (Embargo)

By default, all MuckRock requests are public. This feature has allowed us to build a valuable repository of requests across the nation. We recognize, however that some users will want to keep their requests private, or embargo them.

Users with a paid / premium plan can embargo requests, which keeps them out of public view. With a “Professional” plan ($40/mo) you can embargo requests for up to 30 days at a time — this feature is designed for journalists who want to keep their work under wraps until it is ready to publish. With our “Organization” plan ($100/mo) you can embargo your requests permanently and ensure that they’re never available in public searches.