I’ve been meaning to write this for an age, and now that Tumblr is going around deleting blogs and messing with peoples’ content, it seems like now is the time.
Note that this is not perfect, nor will it work for everybody. Some people have so many Tumblr blog entries that it screws with the backup. Also, I know that not everybody loves WordPress. BUT it’s the best option I’ve found, and the thing about WordPress is that even if you hate it, it has the best functionality around for backing up a copy of your blog and saving it on your hard drive or taking it to a different site that you like better.
So here are the steps:
1: Visit WordPress.com and set up an account there. If you happen to own your own hosted webspace and can install a WordPress blog into it, consider doing this instead–it provides you with more space (WordPress.com offers you a 3GB limit unless you pay them monies), and gives you greater control generally.
2: Create your backup blog. (You can create as many blogs as you like on your WordPress.com account, so you can back up multiple blogs if you want to.)
3: Set your backup WordPress blog to PRIVATE. The setting for this is in the WP Admin dashboard, under Settings>Reading.
Note: If you leave your backup blog public, WordPress.com may delete or freeze it. They’re quite specific about this in their TOS: PUBLIC WordPress.com blogs that are used as nothing more than mirror sites are prohibited. PRIVATE WordPress.com blogs that are used for mirroring or backup are acceptable.
4: Now go into Tools>Import. Choose ‘Tumblr.’ You’ll have to follow some steps to connect your Tumblr account to your WordPress. Once that’s done, WordPress will give you a list of your Tumblr blogs, and you can choose the one you want to back up.
It will begin to copy over your Tumblr entries, including graphics and tags. It will keep active links, layout and date order intact to the best of its ability. Give it a few hours to do this, if you have a lot of entries; it can take a while and if you poke it, you may have to start over which would make a mess.
Note the first: If you cancel the backup, and then try it again, you will probably end up with duplicate copies of your posts.
Note the second: If you wish to merge blogs, you can dump multiple Tumblr blogs into a single WordPress backup blog. However…
Note the third: A free WordPress.com account provides you with 3GB of media storage space. The import will copy over any graphics, audio and video files that are included in your Tumblr posts, and this will probably leave you with more than 3GB of stuff in your media storage. As far as I can tell, WordPress.com will import all your media anyway, but then you may get a ‘storage full’ error if you try to do another import or anything.
Note the fourth: If you have a hell of a lot of Tumblr posts, this may not work. How many is ‘a hell of a lot?’ I have close to 5,000 on my most active Tumblr, and that imported fine (though it took some time). Another person I know has something like 15,000 and she couldn’t get this to work.
Possible workarounds: If you can host your own WordPress blog, do that and you’ll have way more space. It may also fix the problem with being unable to import blogs with huge numbers of entries.
You could also buy a paid account, but that’s pretty expensive since I think WordPress.com makes you pay up front for the entire year.
If you know somebody else with a paid account or hosted webspace, you might be able to have them set you up with a blog on their tab. Because here’s the thing…
5: Now that you have backed up your Tumblr to your WordPress blog, it’s time to back up all your data!
WordPress has a uniquely fantastic ability to save, back up and transport the contents of a blog. Go into Tools>Export, and choose “Create an XML file containing your posts and comments for you to save or import into another WordPress blog.” This will download everything in your blog, including comments if you have any, and save it onto your computer as an XML file. You can then run off with that XML file and upload your entire blog onto another site you like better, if you want, or you can just keep it so that you know you have everything anytime you want it.
You can ALSO set up a WordPress blog on your computer only–not web-accessible, not confined by anything except your own dreams and hard drive space–so that you have a local copy of all your Tumblr stuff. Although that is for another tutorial (or you can Google it).
6: If you want to KEEP your backup WordPress blog up to date, I recommend IFTTT.com. This is a web site that lets you plug in all your social media accounts, and then set up ‘recipes’ so that you can, for example, forward copies of all your tweets to your email–or all your tweets to a specific account to your email. You can use IFTTT to auto-copy each new Tumblr post you make to your backup WordPress.com blog.
Notes: First, this IS NOT retroactive. It will only work for posts that you make after setting up the IFTTT recipe. Second, this method of backup does NOT make copies of graphics and other media on your WordPress blog. You will still see the images in the WordPress copy of your post, but that is because it’s using an HTML link back to the image where it’s hosted on Tumblr.
So. Not perfect, but it’s something–especially when Tumblr is going around deleting blogs. I hope it helps!
Since I posted these a year ago (that’s 2015), and people are interested again in backing up their Tumblrs, I’m updating both of my Tumblr backup posts.
The other post contains other options for backing up your Tumblr, and can be found here: http://ift.tt/29M41Ck
For this one, I’m adding information on setting up a free WordPress installation on your own computer and THEN backing up Tumblr to it.
This doesn’t contain actual instructions, because if you google for them, you can find so many (just make sure they’re relatively recent in the past year or so, because WordPress gets updated to new versions fairly often and sometimes things change). Instead, I’m explaining the rationale behind it and then linking to some sets of instructions I find particularly clear and useful.
Okay, so the thing about WordPress is that there are two different WordPresses. The first version is the well-known WordPress.com,
which is actually a blog-hosting company that offers blogs using the
Wordpress CMS. An account is free, and with an account you can set up multiple blogs for free, but for a number of perks, like
extra space, you have to pay.
But WordPress itself is a piece of software, which is open source freeware available for anyone to use. You can learn about it at WordPress.org.
This means you, yes you, can install WordPress right on your very own
computer at home, for free, although it won’t be useful as a public blog unless
you happen to be running your own web server. But it’s great as a
backup system for basically any and all blogs, including Tumblr,
Wordpress, Blogger, Livejournal, etc.
If you happen to have your own webspace, in most cases you can also install WordPress there, and then it IS a perfectly decent public blog. In fact, many webspace hosting services offer quick WordPress install as one of their available plug-ins.
Also, WordPress has what is still the best import/export setup available in social media. Once you get copies of your material in here, you can export them as a document/spreadsheet which can be accepted by many other blogging services (minus Livejournal and Tumblr, which don’t do import at all), thus letting you copy or migrate your Tumblr to another location online.
To run on your computer, WordPress requires a number of other pieces of software to be installed, mostly for the coding and databases it uses. But fear not! If you are not a techhead, these days there are convenient installation packages and loads of instructions available online. Some options include:
- WAMP (for Windows)
- MAMP (for Mac)
- LAMP (for Linux) – I’m not linking instructions for this one because it can vary so much depending on the Linux version you use. Better to google.
- XAMPP (for multiple OSes)
- Instant WordPress (also for multiple OSes)
If you don’t like the instructions I linked, you can google a bit and find a version that makes more sense to you. They’re all over the place, in many forms–text, image, Youtube. Again, just make sure they’re relatively fresh from the past year or so.
What’s the difference between these kits? I’ve used all of these (at least all the Windows-based ones), and they all work fine. Mainly, I find that the easier it is to install, the more fussing it takes to fix any errors you get–not because it’s more broken, but just because what makes the install streamlined is that they pick auto-settings for you, and in some cases those are not the right settings for your particular situation. But if you get errors, WordPress is such a popular tool that a bit of Googling will almost inevitably dig up help or tutorials that address your problem.
Another advantage of having your own hosted WordPress is the enormous array of plug-ins that are available. Some of these are specifically to customize a public WordPress blog, but some of them are useful to you even if you’re running it as a backup.
Finally, maybe my favorite thing about setting up my own desktop WordPress installation was that it was a real learning experience in terms of understanding the underpinnings of blogs and websites, and how these things are actually built in layers. At the bottom, you have the computer OS (e.g. Windows or Mac); then a web server (e.g. Apache) that lets computers find each other online; an SQL installation to run databases (e.g. MarindaDB) that contain the web content; an interface language like PHP or Python, that talks between the database and the website code; and then you have the website–in this case, WordPress (which uses HTML, CSS and PHP). Once you install the WordPress kit and play around, you begin to get a sense of the logic of these tiers (known as ‘stacks’) and in turn the structure of the internet in general begins to make more sense to you. And with knowledge comes power.
Anyway, you don’t have to do this, but I found it a pretty great experience, even if it started with a bit of frustration. And sometimes WordPress.com is a chump, and this way you have ULTIMATE POWER muah hah hah hah.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/29V1Qft