We’re big fans of the Tumblr blogging platform and we especially love its simplicity — when it comes to Tumblr, not having features is a feature. However, that logic falls apart a little bit when it comes to backing up your blog.

Unlike WordPress, Movable Type and other popular blog tools, Tumblr doesn’t have an easy export tool. In fact, it doesn’t offer any exporting or backup tools.

Tumblr does, however, offer an API which means you can backup your posts by writing your own scripts, or, if you’re looking for something simpler you can use Tumble-log Backup, a webapp that will backup all your Tumblr posts into a single HTML file.

Using Tumble-log Backup couldn’t be simpler — just enter your Tumblr username and choose how many and which type of posts to backup. Then save the resulting HTML file to disk. Some Lifehacker users reported problems saving the file in Firefox, but I didn’t have any trouble.

Tumble-log Backup makes a decent backup tool for most people, but if you’d like to save your Tumblr blog in a more portable format, like say JSON, you can do so with a simple shell command, like this:

curl http://luxagraf.tumblr.com/api/read/json?debug=1 > tumble.bak

In this case my Tumblr name is luxagraf, so just swap that part of the URL with your Tumblr name and you’ll get a nice JSON back up of all your posts.

The downside to both of these approaches is that you don’t get the associated media — images, movie files, etc — that you’ve posted. For that you can use wget to mirror the site. Enter this in the shell and it should grab nearly everything you need:

wget -r -p --no-parent http://username.tumblr.com

The flags tell wget to download recursively, grab all associated media and ignore everything above the sub-domain that is your Tumblr account.

So there you go, several ways to have your Tumblr and back it up too. For more tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Tumblr, check out our tutorial: Get Started With Tumblr.

See Also:

• A Better Tumblr Is On The Way
• Get Started With Tumblr