I was just semi-complaining that I was still looking for a decent way to backup my +6k posts without having to use paid services or even just wordpress (which has an import from tumblr tool that asks for permission to access your blog and also make posts), when I decided to actually put some effort into my google search.
Results were positive: I have successfully backed up my blog*
*By which I mean: everything that I have ever posted. Not included: drafts, queue, likes, followers, following, comments, notes, chat.
I followed this method (word by word), and now have a 450 MB folder on my computer with the name of my blog on it containing:
1. Folder “Archive” (contains .html files listed by month) 2. Folder “Media” (contains gifs and images, mine has +1k files in it; might contain also audios but I have no way of confirming that because I’ve never reblogged an audio post from this blog) 3. Folder “Posts” (contains single .html files, each one a post; I have +4k files in it) 4. Folder “Theme” (contains only my avatar, but it might be a matter of if you have personalized themes or not) 5. .html file “Index” (by opening it it will give you the archive of your blog organized by month; clicking on a month will open up the archive for that month, and you’ll be able to read all the posts for that month as if you were on your blog**, except sans your theme graphic, with each page containing 50 posts)
**I can see gifs, links, embedded videos, tags, number of notes (but I can’t open up the notes, clearly), text is also correctly formatted.
So yeah, in case anyone wants a very quick way to back up their blog, it took me less than 10 minutes.
P.S. I didn’t have any issue, but to be on the safe side always check for spyware and virus threats before and after downloading anything.
this is actually really useful if you have an art blog full of years of work that you otherwise no longer have access to the original files. A lot of the art I have in the early days of my art blog are in that boat. I did this process JUST for that reason and I was pretty astonished at just how many pieces of media it backs up! (literally all of it) Drawings I didn’t even realize were sitting in my archive due to having been posted to text posts or undercuts, or untagged for years! It’s worth it if just for that, even if tumblr isn’t shutting down or deleting your blog.
i genuinely believe that 2012 was the optimal tumblr experience. like if you didnt live through 2012, you havent fully understood how much of a hell site this is. to jog some ppl’s memories:
francieum
quirkybrittany
justgirlythings
“I like your shoelaces” “I stole them from the president” and people actually fucking doing this in public
we still called porn fics “smut” and “lemons”
“you must be fun at parties”
cole sprouse’s tumblr social experiment, and some people taking it so seriously that they threatened mass suicide
mitt romney
hetastuck (hetalia and homestuck fandoms were moirails i guess)
hussieruya (people unironically shipping the creators of hetalia and homestuck)
andrew hussie actually asking about hussieruya in his twitter
the obsession with andrew hussie’s lips
superwholock fandom (this was their prime)
supernatural has a gif for everything
“Fuck you watson” somehow being praised as the best comeback possible?? ok lol
hipster side of tumblr vs fandom side of tumblr, and all those pictures of the two coexisting to bring some sort of peace? as if we were at war with each other?? wtf was up with that
the dumbest fake stories holy shit, and everyone believed them
benedict cumberbatch everywhere
that sherlock gif of benedict cumberbatch looking into a door’s peep hole and people saying how if you cover one side of his face he looks confident but if you cover the other side he looks sad, so they said he’s the best actor in the world or whatever
gangnam style everywhere
people being shamed from using memes or even saying the word meme
“Oh, you facebook people think tumblr is boring? Well, we’ll find you…Supernatural fandom, grab your demons! Sherlock fandom, grab your Watsons! Doctor Who fandom, grab your Tardises! Harry Potter fandom, grab your wands! Homestuck fandom, grab your strife cards! Hetalia fandom, grab your pasta!” proceed for 1628519 more fandoms
“im pretty sure thats taylor swift” “no thats becky”
the dancing chandler gif from friends
“Reblog if you dont have a problem with gay marriage!” followed by ten mile long additions of rainbow gifs and pictures and 9gag memes
potato jesus (i’ll admit, this was actually funny)
the reblog button being at the top of posts
cuil theory, aka “i give you a hamburger”
27 comments on a post just saying “INSTANT REBLOG” or “PRESS PLAY”
song mixups from people “accidentally opening a bunch of tabs playing music” but it was actually from a pop mix album
“ah, the scalene triangle”
XD vs 😀 discourse
the most reblogged picture on tumblr
doge
men of tumblr
the cursed long ass “fedoras arent that bad!” post
touch my butt and buy me pizza
spread this like wildfire
tumblr university (complete with uniforms)
tumblr island
tumblr nation
these all would lead to the creation and failure of dashcon
some people’s blogs are being incorrectly flagged as explicit so if you would like to check your status, you can look it up on postlimit.com.
if you have been incorrectly marked as nsfw, you can appeal before tumblr permanently filters you as such and your blog is set back to default settings prior to december 18th here.
Everyone: this is how I found out I was flagged and marked explicit. Check your stuff out and make sure you’re good to go.
OKAY SO realtalk i haven’t actually used feedly in a long time, it’s just the most newbie-friendly and has a decent ‘tumblr-esque’ interface for someone used to scrolling a dash
so i was totally unawares that, for the most part, you could just paste channel and blog links straight into the rss reader and have it pick up the feed and give you updates, without you having to figure out where the feed is hiding
so just take a minute to make an account, paste some tumblr/dreamwidth/mastodon/artstation/youtube urls in there, and go nuts
i’m just gonna post all the ways i’ve found so far to get RSS Links They Don’t Want You To Know About from social media sites, because people keep Leaving Tumblr Forever in favor of sites that i’m not going to use
(if you don’t have an rss reader yet just make a feedly account, it takes about one whole minute, if you decide to use a different reader later you can export your whole list, it’s fine)
i’m gonna use strikethrough to indicate the text you need to replace and also include examples of feeds that seem to work
A General Rule
on almost any website look for the icon that looks like this
that’s the button that means ‘the rss feed is here’
Tumblr
just add /rss to the end of literally any blog’s url, including tags
i.e. unpretty.tumblr.com/rss or unpretty.tumblr.com/tagged/original/rss
now you can Leave Tumblr Forever and still follow blogs until such a time as tumblr implodes in earnest
Dreamwidth
use username.dreamwidth.org/data/rss
i.e. gallusrostromegalus.dreamwidth.org/data/rss
WordPress
if it’s hosted on WordPress.com, just add /feed to the end of the url
if it’s self-hosted (i think around 20% of people who have their own website use wordpress to host it, i know i do bc it’s easy as sin) also just add /feed to the end the url
i.e. en.blog.wordpress.com/feed or kittyunpretty.com/feed
ArtStation
use username.artstation.com/rss
i.e. beccahallstedt.artstation.com/rss
Mastodon
just add .rss to the end of someone’s profile url
i.e. cybre.space/@kittyunpretty.rss
deviantART
use backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Ausername
i.e. backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Aarvalis
YouTube
this one’sa goddamn pain in the dick because you need to find the channel id first
in general youtube channels have a nonsense url like youtube.com/channel/abunchofbullshit
you have to take that last bit and plug it into youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=abunchofbullshit
i.e. youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCbpMy0Fg74eXXkvxJrtEn3w
Tapas
this is mostly handy for webcomics that were hosting on tumblr and crossposting, i think? i don’t know how tapas works for creators tbqh. anyway they’ve actually got a button at the top when you go to the comic page.
the one between ‘add to library’ and the paper airplane will give you the rss feed
LINE Webtoons
ditto wrt tumblr-hosted webcomics, and also having a button
the button to the left of the one that says +subscribe will get you the rss feed
Twitter & Instagram
these are the only two sites i’m including that don’t have native rss support, just because so goddamn many people have literally no other web presence at all for some reason
twitter used to have rss feeds but killed them, and i don’t think instagram ever had them. you have to use workarounds for these, and a lot of them end up getting killed, like TwitRSS.me. fetchrss seems to work okay but it costs money. if you pay for inoreader they’ve got built-in support for following twitter accounts but that’s not a practical solution for most people.
right now i use rsshub.app/platform/user/username
i.e. rsshub.app/twitter/user/dasharez0ne
… but the instagram one doesn’t actually seem to work, like, most of the time. i don’t know if i’ve found one that works ever. if you’re jumping ship there please consider doing the world the enormous goddamn favor of just making a free wordpress.com account and cross-posting all your instas with ifttt or something, rather than being totally at the mercy of mark zuckerberg
this post will be updated as I find more websites to add! please check with the original before reblogging to see if there’s an updated version, and message me with more suggestions if you have them!!
for general use
myspace.com – yes, it still exists, i’m just as surprised as you
soup.io – very similar to tumblr, plus it can import your tumblr blog
twitter.com – allows posting both text and photos in sets, allows retweets
livejournal.com – still an option, but questionably safe for fandom
wordpress.com – old and well-established, often considered the default
geared towards artists and photographers
deviantart.com – huge community, allows posting art + sorting into folders
furaffinity.net – similar to DA but for furries, easy to display commish info
instagram.com – photo and video posts, excellent tag search
piczel.tv – allows both streaming and posting art / photosets to a gallery
pixiv.net – huge anime art community, allows livestreaming
paid platforms
patreon.com – subscription-based access to many diff types of content
pillowfort.io – still in beta, but should function almost identically to tumblr
typepad.com – similar to wordpress but with reblogging and a dash
ways to save your current tumblr posts
use the wayback machine! you do have to archive each page of your blog individually but once you do all the content, including media, will be saved exactly as it was at the moment you archived it.
wordpress and soup both allow you to directly import whole tumblr blogs, and if i recall correctly it’s something both dreamwidth and pillowfort have said they are working on.
if you have some knowledge of computers you can try this github solution which uses a python script to download your whole blog to your computer.
even if you don’t know anything about programming or the command line
they give a very good beginners tutorial on how to use it so you should still give it a shot!
this post will be updated as I find more websites to add! please check with the original before reblogging to see if there’s an updated version, and message me with more suggestions if you have them!!
for general use
myspace.com – yes, it still exists, i’m just as surprised as you
soup.io – very similar to tumblr, plus it can import your tumblr blog
twitter.com – allows posting both text and photos in sets, allows retweets
livejournal.com – still an option, but questionably safe for fandom
wordpress.com – old and well-established, often considered the default
geared towards artists and photographers
deviantart.com – huge community, allows posting art + sorting into folders
furaffinity.net – similar to DA but for furries, easy to display commish info
instagram.com – photo and video posts, excellent tag search
piczel.tv – allows both streaming and posting art / photosets to a gallery
pixiv.net – huge anime art community, allows livestreaming
paid platforms
patreon.com – subscription-based access to many diff types of content
pillowfort.io – still in beta, but should function almost identically to tumblr
typepad.com – similar to wordpress but with reblogging and a dash
ways to save your current tumblr posts
use the wayback machine! you do have to archive each page of your blog individually but once you do all the content, including media, will be saved exactly as it was at the moment you archived it.
wordpress and soup both allow you to directly import whole tumblr blogs, and if i recall correctly it’s something both dreamwidth and pillowfort have said they are working on.
if you have some knowledge of computers you can try this github solution which uses a python script to download your whole blog to your computer.
even if you don’t know anything about programming or the command line
they give a very good beginners tutorial on how to use it so you should still give it a shot!
It was insanely fast in comparison and worked as intended.
interesting. i have done a couple of under-1k-post blogs, they seem okay, my main blog is somewhere well over 4GB, and i would expect it to be broken because zip doesn’t necessarily handle that well.
My blogs with under 2000 posts seem to finish processing in a few hours, and become downloadable. However, around the 2000 post point, even if the blog finishes processing, the download doesn’t actually work. It downloads half or a quarter or some fraction of the zip, and breaks.
Soup.io – well-known alternative to Tumblr. Reblogging, post types, themes, collab blogs, dashboard, artsy, great community already there. Soup can auto-import everything you’ve posted on Tumblr.
TypePad – Includes reblogging. Dashboard and post types similar to Tumblr.
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