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Back Up Your Tumblr Blog

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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.

Luckily, there are some roll-your-own options.

This article is part of the Webmonkey wiki. It's fully editable, so if you have any tips, tricks or ideas to improve this article, log in and contribute.


Contents

Use the Tumblr API

Tumblr does offer an API. This means you can back up your posts by writing your own scripts.


Use the Tumblr Backup Webapp

If you're looking for something simpler you can use Tumble-log Backup, a web app 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.

Note: Some users on the Lifehacker blog have reported problems saving the file in Firefox. These reports have not been confirmed.


Use JSON

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, the name of the Tumblr blog we're backing up is luxagraf. Just swap that part of the URL with your Tumblr name and you'll get a nice JSON back up of all your posts.


Use wget

The downside to the approaches listed above is that you don't get the associated media you've posted —- images, movie files, etc. For that you can use the command line tool 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.


Additional Reading

For more tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Tumblr, check out our tutorials.

Retrieved from "http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/Back_Up_Your_Tumblr_Blog"
  • This page was last modified 22:25, 8 October 2008.
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