I’ve spent the last 4 days exploring options for backing up one’s blog (no no, it’s not like I had anything else planned, why would you ask that, especially right around the holiday, thanks tumblr), and here’s a summation of finds and recommendations.
*Disclaimer* I am not a computer engineer or a web-designer or anything. I can’t explain how to do any of this in technical terms, because I don’t know the technical terms. I got stuck for hours on one part because I couldn’t figure out what URL I should be using. I am a novice and a newbie and this is just a summary of my fumblings.
TLDR: If you want your whole blog, use the official Tumblr backup, but it may take several days to process. If you have Windows and want primarily your media, use TumblThree. If you want to play around and don’t mind going into the basement of your computer, tumblr_utils, ripme, and backup_tumblr all have slightly different pluses and minuses. Unfortunately, the free version of Wordpress.com isn’t going to offer enough space for most blogs that have been around for a few years to transfer over, but if you have access to your own domain and wordpress.org, it would be a really easy backup.
Also: these will all be really large files (anywhere from 30-150GB). So make sure you have the space on your hard drive for them.
Option 1- Tumblr. The official tumblr backup is really the best option for making a copy of all of your files that you can then download and store on your computer/external hard drive. It includes all of your photos, video, audio, text posts, both original and reblogs - basically everything that is your blog. Go to settings, select your blog, and scroll all the way down to export. It takes about 12-24 hours (and maybe more depending on the size of your blog) for Tumblr to create the zip. It then took me about 4 hours to download my 45GB file (I have ~ 17K posts) - don’t let your computer go to sleep during this time!
How to Use: Go to Settings -> Select the blog you want to backup -> Scroll all the way to the bottom -> Click Export and wait. When it’s ready, tumblr will email you, go back to this page and there will be a Download link there as well.
Pros: easy, lovely organization, all of the media. No need to know extra coding. Gets your messages as well.
Cons: big file depending on the size of your blog (but this is going to be a problem with all of the options). Does not grab likes or drafts, as far as I’m aware. No incremental backups - every time you click to export, it’s going to export your whole entire blog. So probably will only be helpful once and then maybe yearly to update.
Option 2 - TumblThree. TumblThree is a windows only application, which is really easy to use once you download and install. You need to tweak some of the settings before you start so it grabs reblogs if you want them and specify where you want the directory, etc, and then you add the blog(s), click the button and presto, it’ll download all the blogs media, including pictures, audio, and videos. It puts everything into one folder, so it can look disorganized, and I haven’t found a way to associate metadata (which is just text files) with the media. But if just having your media is important, this is a really easy way to do that.
Pros: easy installation, easy importer. Grabs all media files (be sure to select video in settings before you start), relatively fast downloader. Will grab Likes, with some additional configuration. Never run into data limits - I downloaded a whole bunch of videos without any problems. Once you add a blog, the program will refresh and download new media. Filters and doesn’t download duplicate media.
Cons: Organization sucks (but maybe I haven’t explored enough)? Windows only, no Mac or Linux option. Metadata is save as a couple of big text files (audio, video, photos). Only gets tumblr hosted media.
Option 3 - tumblr-utils. This has been the method that I’ve been using the most over the last several days. It’s more challenging to use, as it requires Python (which is a coding language that I have never touched until Wednesday) and using Terminal, but the instructions are fairly straightforward. I know next to nothing but am pretty good at copying and pasting things other people have done. There were a few times when I was pretty sure I was going to crash my entire system (I didn’t), but once I got everything in place, it works really well. It grabs everything with some additional to the command line, has a really nice organization style and will tell you quickly if you’ve made a mistake. I used it to download a complete backup of my tumblr and my likes, as well as backing up a bunch of fanart blogs. Here’s another user’s experience. I really recommend reading over exactly what the app can do and deciding what you want before executing it.
Pros: Works for Mac as well as Windows. Nicely organized. Can download all images, video (both tumblr hosted and elsewhere) and audio (although you have to specify that you want audio and video). Can also just grab by blog type (photo,text,quote, etc), or by tag. Incremental, scheduled updates where it looks for new posts to download without going through the whole thing again. No data limits.
Cons: kinda terrifying to use if you’re a newbie at all of this. If you organize in directories, it doesn’t weed out any duplicates, so your folder in the end will be much larger. Complicated for newbies to computer programming, but instructions are pretty straight-forward. If you are just looking to download certain tags, it browses through the entire blog (one person had 192,000 blog posts that it slogged through to grab 16 art posts).
Option 4 - RipMe. This one works in Java - I didn’t know Java was anything more than something that made videos play. I downloaded and played with it last night, and it really does a great job of extracting all of the media files from your blog. It doesn’t get text files or anything. I’ve run into problems with exceeding Tumblr’s API limit and then it gives me errors. Follow the instructions to set up and use here.
Pros: Quick downloader of pictures and videos. Simple organization. Works on both Mac/Windows. Works on other sites besides tumblr (I used it on deivantart yesterday).
Cons: data limits - if you have a blog larger than ~ 5K posts, it’s going to take a long time, with several breaks, to download everything. No extra information, no text files or HTML, so if your picture was part of a fanfic, you won’t have preserved the fic.
Option 5 - backup_tumblr. This one I haven’t played around with much, because I had found other options before this started circulating around. It requires python/terminal as well, but it’s a much more straight forward installation. It will only download your own blog/sideblogs because it requires you to create an authentication key (I didn’t know what that meant either). I also ran into problems with data limits - you can apparently email tumblr and ask for a data limit exception but I have no idea how responsive they are to those kind of requests. I’ve downloaded metadata for my blog and likes, but I haven’t actually tried to download the media files yet because of the data limit (which won’t be lifted for me until tomorrow).
Pros: Straight-forward instructions. Minimal computer expertise needed. Grabs likes as well. Creator was very responsive to questions. Download looks formatted to easily move to another blog if needed. Works on both Mac/Windows.
Cons: Data limits will affect ability to backup a larger blog. I couldn’t figure out how to register an API (but I got it figured out and it was such an easy thing that I’m more than a little embarrassed about it).
Option 6 - Wordpress. I reblogged “import you tumblr into wordpress” instructions the other day, set up my wordpress blog, clicked the importer, and watched as it did nothing. I’m still at 0/16700 progress. Last night, I did some searching to find out why and the short answer: my tumblr is too big. Wordpress allows 6GB of space and my blog is at least 40GB. Unfortunately, it seems like the program just dies rather than telling you what’s wrong. Even if you were to buy a “premium account” with wordpress, they only allow you 10GB of space. I own my own domain and webspace on a business plan, and even that only has 100GB available. I might try moving mine over, but it’s not going to work for the basic user.
ADDENDUM: got an email that my blog transfer was too large, but it’s still spinning and marked as “in-progress”. The latest message on their support forum states that free blogs are limited to 3GB, which probably isn’t going to work for most. Looks like it downloaded ~5000 of my posts.
Pros: the importer tool is really simple - just one button to click and it does all the rest. Will download all media (both tumblr and non-tumblr hosted).
Cons: Not enough space to transfer and host a full tumblr on wordpress.com. Still an option if you host your own.
Other things: I haven’t found any programs that will download drafts, which may or may not be a big deal to you. I also haven’t found a way to download notes, so if a lot of your conversation has been done in the notes, that will be lost. Tumblr download will grab your messages in an XML, which again looks ugly but it’s all there.
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