I know that many of us are trying to backup our Tumblr accounts, with varying degrees of success, because the 'adult content' deadline is Monday 17th December. Tumblr's own native backup is pretty useless, as we've been finding out. I only have about 4,300 posts and it took over three hours for me. The result? One single 5GB zip file... that was corrupt. I couldn't even repair it. Time and effort completely wasted.
However, I've found that the Python method, detailed
here (with an incredibly helpful walk-through video
here) helped me to back up my entire Tumblr account in less than an hour. The total size of all files, folders, and images was about 2.5GB.
If you've never done anything like that before, don't be scared to try it. Watch the video a couple of times, then watch it again--pausing it after each instruction--and follow along. It's really very simple.
I would recommend putting the Tumblr Utils folder onto a backup drive, if you have one. I would also recommend (especially for those people with tens of thousands of posts, going back many years!) backing up one year at a time. The video will show you the command to use for that.
Possible issues you might encounter1. If you're using Windows 7 and not seeing that 'path' option in Advanced Environments, don't worry. Simply click 'New' and enter 'Path' in the top section, followed by pasting the actual path in the bottom section. Click 'OK', then close those windows. Also close the Command Prompt, then re-open it before you start the backup.
2. If you get a
"An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host down loading [image link]" error while your blog is downloading it's easy to get those files. To grab them you first need to copy the links. If you've never tried to copy text from the Command Prompt before, it doesn't work like any other copy method!
- Right-click anywhere in the Command Prompt window and select 'Mark'
- Left-click at the top left of the text you want to copy, and drag a marquee around the text. It won't follow the lines; instead it will simply highlight inside the marquee, so make sure that white covers all the text that you want to copy
- To copy the text, just hit the ENTER key on your keyboard (don't right-click-copy, or CTRL + C, just hit ENTER!)
- Open up a Notepad file, then paste the text into it as normal
- Wait until the current year has finished downloading
- Copy the first link in your error message list, and paste it into your browser
- Right-click the image and Save As into the Media folder of your Tumblr Utils folder
- Done!
Hopefully this will help those of you who might be despairing of ever getting that backup job done before the deadline hits. Good luck!
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