With over two billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most ubiquitous online service in the world, but it's also a time and data sink that wants to keep you hooked in the name of its advertising profits.

Our guide to permanently deleting or deactivating your Facebook account will take you through backing up your data, checking your advertising profile, disconnecting your account from other services, temporarily disabling it so you can continue to use Messenger and fully deleting your account.

You'll need to be using a desktop web browser to work through these instructions.

Back everything up

You may have put a lot of original content up on Facebook, from photos to essays and diary entries, so you'll probably want to keep your own offline copy after removing your account. Facebook makes it pretty easy to download all your personal posts and information. Go to your settings page (also accessible via the ▾ drop-down menu to the right of Facebook's top bar) and, under your General Account Settings, a link will invite you to Download a copy of your Facebook data.

Click Start My Archive, enter your password when prompted and confirm that you want to Start My Archive. This can take some time, so an email will be sent to your associated email address when it's ready to download.

Facebook took about 20 minutes to prepare a 90MB archive for us. Once you've received the email, click on the link provided, select Download Your Archive, enter your password and wait for the zip file to download.

Your archive will include everything you've ever posted along with all the metadata associated with your account, but not copies of photos uploaded by others that you've been tagged in.

Disassociate your devices & services

Facebook account deletion and deactivation requests can be cancelled if you log back into the account during the waiting period... which can become very annoying. To avoid this happening by accident, disassociate all devices from your account by going to your Security and login settings, selecting See more from the Where you're logged in section, and selecting Log out of all sessions.

This should log you out of not only all browser sessions, but also all mobile apps. To be on the safe side (and remove temptation), it's worth manually deleting all Facebook apps (including Messenger) from your smartphone while you're at it.

Facebook is widely-used as a Single Sign-On (SSO) service for other sites. Logging into any of these can potentially reactivate a deactivated Facebook account, and deleting your Facebook account could also prevent you from accessing some of the sites you use it to log into.

To see which services are associated with your account, go to the applications tab in your Facebook settings page. Go through and delete all the apps listed in the Logged in with Facebook section using the X symbol on each icon.

If you're not sure whether or not you have an alternate login method set up for any of them, visit the app or service's main site and check your account settings to make sure you have a dedicated username and password set up that you can use for them in your Facebook-free future.

Transfer ownership of your groups, pages and apps

If you're responsible for managing any groups or pages on Facebook, or any apps that integrate with it, your users would probably prefer it if you didn't just leave them hanging when you remove your account.

An app is automatically deleted if its sole owner deletes their account, while Pages and Groups can become unmanageable.

For Pages, the best option is to go to each of the pages you administrate, click the Settings option at the top right, select Page roles from the tab bar at the left of the screen and assign an Admin role to your replacement.

In the case of Groups you manage, go to your main Groups list and scroll down to see a list of those you manage. If you're the only administrator of any of them, visit the group, select Members from the left-hand options, find someone you trust (and who doesn't mind doing the job), select the ... icon next to their name and select Make Admin.

If you've developed any applications using the Facebook platform, go to your Facebook for developers account, select each app, go to Roles and Add Administrator to give a friend control over the app and its future development.

Finally, if you're running any adverts on Facebook from your personal account, you should also ensure that your Ads Manager account is paid up and that any relevant ads are handed over to someone else in your business using the Add People option.

Manage your advertising data

Facebook exists to gather advertising data about its users, and it'll keep doing that for as long as you use its services. However, you can view, edit and, to a limited extent, control your ad settings via the Ad preferences options.

Here, you can opt out of things like having your activities on Facebook turned into ads for others and advertising based on your use of other websites, disable adverts based on personal information such as your relationship status and view lists of advertisers you've interacted with.

We recommend disabling all ad features under the Your information and Ad settings categories. Some users may also have access to the experimental Hide ad topics feature, which in our case gave us the option of hiding adverts about alcohol or parenting, presumably intended to help people cope with going sober or in the aftermath of a bereavement.

Deactivate your Facebook account

Deactivation disables your social media profile but leaves your data stored on Facebook's servers and allows you to continue using other Facebook services.

It's your only option if you want to continue using Facebook's Messenger chat service, but no longer want a full Facebook account.

To deactive your Facebook profile, go to your Settings page and select Manage account from the main pane. Select Deactivate your account.

You'll be presented with a low-key guilt trip about how much your friends will miss you, and some further options, asking you to specify your reasons for leaving, allowing you to opt-out of Facebook emails – which we strongly recommend – and prompting you to delete or transfer ownership of any apps that you're the sole developer of.

Permanently delete your Facebook account

If you want to fully delete your account, also deletes your Facebook Messenger chat service account.

Account deletion can take up to 90 days. While your account will become invisible to friends during this period, it may spontaneously reactivate if you log back in. However, this isn't guaranteed. In fact, Facebook warns that "you won't be able to reactivate your account or retrieve anything you've added" after the deletion process has begun, so it's important to be sure that you really mean to get rid of your account before you hit that button.