I'm feeling so heartbroken about the Tumblr announcement. I will lose years of curated content and writing, and over 850 drafts, plus the safe place that helped me find myself and embrace my sexuality. I can only imagine what artists are feeling at losing art blogs. #SizeTwitter, save us!
You can find me on Twitter as Elle Largesse (@mightytinygiant): https://twitter.com/mightytinygiant
Or mightytinygiant#3569 on Discord.
I'm considering a WordPress blog as well, but it won't be the same.
For anyone looking for blog backups, I'm going to quote @elamantemenguante here. The loss of his blog will be a tragedy for our community. I'm going to try this backup method tonight.
(http://elamantemenguante.tumblr.com/post/180459730594/tumblr-often-re-defaults-people-to-safe-search):
On the desktop, go to Settings, then select the blog you want to back up, then click Export Blog.
Out of curiosity, I actually did this to see what I’d get. At 9842 published posts, 270 posts in Drafts, and 180 posts in the Queue, it took Tumblr 75 minutes to prepare a backup for ElAmanteMenguante. The resulting archive came to 25GB, which took 90 minutes to download.
Unzipped, the archive contains all the posts as separate files with the media stored in a subfolder (you have to move the media into the folder with the posts to get the filepaths correct). The posts are bare bones, without any theme you might have been using. There’s a master posts.xml file, but it seems to lack the .css libary to make a true index of the posts. The individual post files don’t seem to have any useful naming conventions, so unless I’m missing something about how to open the posts.xml file, it’s near-impossible to reconstruct the blog exactly how it appears on Tumblr.
Dunno what I’m going to do with this. 25GB is not an inconsequential volume for me. Since I already have a lot of this stuff stored more usefully, and I see little value in trying to precisely restore ElAmanteMenguante elsewhere, I’ll probably get rid of it soon.
But, for those of you who don’t have other backups, you might consider trying it.