Since cloning and running tumblr-utils (https://github.com/bbolli/tumblr-utils) to backup your Tumblr yourself is something people report as being a touch aversive, I’ve thrown together a very simple, stupid service that just wraps their backup script to download and serve you a zip file containing a HTML backup of a public, not-NSFW (see provisos) Tumblr.
Going to https://tumblrbackup.beshir.org/download?tumblr=<name>, so https://tumblrbackup.beshir.org/download?tumblr=jbeshir for example, will spit out a zip for the tumblr of that name.
It’s currently running on my desktop and I’ll probably turn this off after a few days of it not being used (I only spent an hour on it and then half an hour posting about it and shifting DNS around), but if people keep using it I’ll migrate it to a server and leave it going for as long as they are.
Provisos:
- As mentioned, doesn’t work for logged-in-only or NSFW-flagged blogs. This is because the API requires you to be authenticated with OAuth to access those and tumblr-utils doesn’t support that.
- Doesn’t include the contents of other people’s readmores you’ve reblogged. It backs up yours, but other people’s posts you reblog, the reblog only contains the short version of their post. It isn’t smart enough to follow links to download their full text.
- Doesn’t backup drafts; only full posts.
- Backs up images, but not audio or videos. The script can do those with the right configuration, but I’ve not done the configuration to make the service do them because they’re big.
If your blog has been active and old enough to accumulate >=1GB or so of images, you might have to wait for a fair while (<10 minutes) “waiting for tumblrbackup.beshir.org” for it to start going, during which there is no progress feedback. - If a load of people start using this at once it will probably just melt until I fix it.
Let me know if this works or doesn’t for you and I’ll try to fix any issues; if people want to try to fix any of those provisos, most of them would be a matter of trying to improve tumblr-utils which looks to be active enough to review submissions and stuff, and then letting me know so I update the version I’m using.
(I’ve no personal plans to move away from Tumblr in the immediate future, but I might follow other people who migrate eventually.)