How to Back Up Your Tumblr Account

[soc_puppet]

Even if Tumblr doesn't end up dissolving into so many pixels, it's a good idea to export and/or otherwise back up your account if you have something you want to keep! There's a couple options I know about for how to do it:

Option one: Go to blog settings and export your blog. This is Tumblr's built-in option. Unfortunately, it can take a while, and IIRC isn't recommended for blogs with 10k posts or more. It is also not possible to do via the app. Which is when we get into...

Option two: Export your Tumblr to Wordpress. Wordpress is ultimately owned and run by the same people (person) as Tumblr, so if you don't like how things have been going since Automattic picked things up, you may want to consider...

Option three: Using a Python script. I've done this twice now, and it takes a while, but I'm pretty sure I got everything. There's a tutorial you can use here, which should reduce headaches at least a bit. Important note if you're using this method: The directions for getting your API Key are in the Google doc (first link in this option). It can take a bit for the less computer savvy (like myself) to figure everything out here, but if you have more stuff in your account and don't trust Wordpress, it's probably your best option.


Best of luck!

Comments

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

This will be tremendously useful. \o/

Re: Thank you!

[soc_puppet]

Definitely.

[cyare]

Fantastic tutorial, thank you!

I used option one around a week ago. It took Tumblr 4 days to create a download link for the back up and once I had it, it was almost 6Gb :O But now I can save the zip in my external hard drive, yay!

[soc_puppet]

Thanks 😁

I backed up a defunct side blog that way last year, and it took over a day for something with fewer than 100 posts to be ready; I wasn't impressed, but at least I don't have to do it again!

Meanwhile, I backed up my main blog at the same time via the Python script, and it took less time, even though I'm pretty sure I had some 20k posts at the time. I don't think I reblogged anything I'll miss terribly in the past year, so I might not make another backup this time around unless Tumblr takes like, months to disintegrate.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

You can also save pages individually, if you want to keep adding things to your Tumblr. Wayback, Ghost, and Archive.Today are a few of the options that will save how a page looks for later use.

[arcanetrivia]

(repeating the comment I made on the_great_tumblr_purge, if you don't mind)

I don't think I've ever seen a warning threshold stated for "not recommended if over X posts", but do be aware that besides it taking a while to process, that the resulting file is very large. My main blog hails from August 2011 and has about 24.5K posts; the export I just made on April 10th took 11 days and was 36.7 GB. My sideblog that is about 3800 posts was 3.8 GB, and since it took about the same time, I think it may not be dependent on the size of the blog content so much as things are just processed in a queue that takes some time.