Folks, backup your Tumblrs, for real this time

To be clear, I don't have any news about any impending doom. But I've heard a bit more about what's going on with staff after the layoff of last week, and there are even less people than I thought still working here.

I don't think even the current staff know what's going to happen, but honestly, I don't see how the high ups could even pretend to intend to keep this place open while virtually unstaffed.

And of course, if the most despicable thing happens, you can find me at @javi@goblin.band from any fediverse platform 🤷

for reference, OP is a former employee of Tumblr who tries to keep up to date with tumblr’s inner workings. please back your blogs up.

In your blog settings you have the ability to initiate a blog export, and this will generate a backup for your blog.

Fair warning though, if you've been on the platform for a long time this archive is likely to be quite hefty in file size. This blog I have had for 5 years with 22k posts, and the export from tumblr came to be 48GB. My previous blog I made in 2011 and has 95k posts, so needless to say I did not use tumblr's built in export to back that one up.

If you want more control over exactly what you back up from your blog, I recommend that you use tumblr-utils instead. It allows you to backup specific tags, post types, and to ignore posts that you did not create (reblogs where you've added a comment count as a post you created, to be clear).

To use it:

now in the window that opens it should show the current path, and you can type "py -2 .\tumblr_backup.py [your options] [your blog name]" and hit enter. Example:

Backing up just my original posts from this blog with this command came to 632MB rather than 48GB, and also gave me the option to save my posts in JSON format which will be useful for converting my posts to a new format for self hosting.

On that note I'm currently looking into figuring out a simple (and ideally free) way of self hosting a static site blog that utilises activitypub, and also converting my old posts to re-host on said blog.

This post series by maho.dev on implementing activitypub with any static site is my primary source of guidance atm if you also want to try figure that out yourself, as well as having an explanation for why you'd even want to do this if you don't already know

but if tumblr goes down before I get things sorted and write up a post about it then i'll be reporting back on it via my bsky, mastodon, and toyhouse accounts

if you dont have an account on any of these I'll also be sharing an update via my personal site's RSS feed, link of which includes an explanation of what RSS is and some feed readers you can use, I highly recommend checking it out as getting a feed reader is going to be the best way you can stay connected with people if they scatter across the internet!

tldr: download tumblr-utils to backup your blog more efficiently, introduce yourself to RSS and get a feed reader to stay connected with people, consider saving mine so you can find out how to self host your blog later if tumblr goes down

A lot of good info, good addition!

However, there is a new version of tumblr-utils packaged for python3.

This seems like the pypi page for it.

Please don't recommend people install python2. It has been dead for 5 years.

@magz wrote up a generic backup guide here, which includes setting up python3 and tumblr-backup:

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1yBWlk-yEgpSoEh3c9oLhz_kbLtUGqbqzOpCtJsvQgjI/mobilebasic?pli=1#h.jkgxcwlthgj0

some crazy good fanfic in my google docs. whatever guy started writing it i hope he finishes it

Reblog to give a trans woman a delicious Cuban sandwich

*sigh*

*reblog*

From our first tournament!

for the @bucktommyaupril fantasy week, buck and tommy as knights

was it casual when you used the last of your powers to copy my DNA after my death and fused our body and soul together after I was gone in an attempt to bring me back

I like to think if given drinks like in the first ball, Sausage would’ve covered them in sooooooooo many kisses

Put on a kpop playlist titled "old kpop songs" and it's stuff from 2015 to 2021... I feel like I just turned into dust

This playlist is taking me to dark places... listening to dope in the year 2025

I hate having banger fanfic ideas. What do you expect me to do? Write them down????????????

fuck it, i'm curious. reblog and tag with the first fictional death to ever rewrite your brain chemistry and/or make you cry like a baby. mine was ares from the underland chronicles (who, for context, was a giant bat.) to this day i will weep if i think too hard about it. okay, go.

Adam Sandlers death in the movie Click was the first time i really understood that people in real life die. and i remember praying to Jesus asking him to please let Adam Sandler into heaven if he ever died in real life