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If you ask a goose a question, he never shuts up

@squidsandthings

Call me Goose or Squid || They/Them|| Multifandom-ish || Midwest Menace

mutuals are more than welcome to follow me on tumblr btw:)

mutuals are more than

welcome to follow me on

tumblr btw:)

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Backing Up Tumblr

I’ve spent the last 4 days exploring options for backing up one’s blog (no no, it’s not like I had anything else planned, why would you ask that, especially right around the holiday, thanks tumblr), and here’s a summation of finds and recommendations.

*Disclaimer* I am not a computer engineer or a web-designer or anything. I can’t explain how to do any of this in technical terms, because I don’t know the technical terms. I got stuck for hours on one part because I couldn’t figure out what URL I should be using. I am a novice and a newbie and this is just a summary of my fumblings. 

TLDR: If you want your whole blog, use the official Tumblr backup, but it may take several days to process. If you have Windows and want primarily your media, use TumblThree. If you want to play around and don’t mind going into the basement of your computer, tumblr_utils, ripme, and backup_tumblr all have slightly different pluses and minuses. Unfortunately, the free version of Wordpress.com isn’t going to offer enough space for most blogs that have been around for a few years to transfer over, but if you have access to your own domain and wordpress.org, it would be a really easy backup. 

Also: these will all be really large files (anywhere from 30-150GB). So make sure you have the space on your hard drive for them. 

Option 1- Tumblr. The official tumblr backup is really the best option for making a copy of all of your files that you can then download and store on your computer/external hard drive. It includes all of your photos, video, audio, text posts, both original and reblogs - basically everything that is your blog. Go to settings, select your blog, and scroll all the way down to export. It takes about 12-24 hours (and maybe more depending on the size of your blog) for Tumblr to create the zip. It then took me about 4 hours to download my 45GB file (I have ~ 17K posts) - don’t let your computer go to sleep during this time! How to Use: Go to Settings -> Select the blog you want to backup -> Scroll all the way to the bottom -> Click Export and wait. When it’s ready, tumblr will email you, go back to this page and there will be a Download link there as well.  Pros: easy, lovely organization, all of the media. No need to know extra coding. Gets your messages as well.  Cons: big file depending on the size of your blog (but this is going to be a problem with all of the options). Does not grab likes or drafts, as far as I’m aware. No incremental backups - every time you click to export, it’s going to export your whole entire blog. So probably will only be helpful once and then maybe yearly to update. 

Option 2 - TumblThree. TumblThree is a windows only application, which is really easy to use once you download and install. You need to tweak some of the settings before you start so it grabs reblogs if you want them and specify where you want the directory, etc, and then you add the blog(s), click the button and presto, it’ll download all the blogs media, including pictures, audio, and videos. It puts everything into one folder, so it can look disorganized, and I haven’t found a way to associate metadata (which is just text files) with the media. But if just having your media is important, this is a really easy way to do that. Pros: easy installation, easy importer. Grabs all media files (be sure to select video in settings before you start), relatively fast downloader. Will grab Likes, with some additional configuration. Never run into data limits - I downloaded a whole bunch of videos without any problems. Once you add a blog, the program will refresh and download new media. Filters and doesn’t download duplicate media.  Cons: Organization sucks (but maybe I haven’t explored enough)? Windows only, no Mac or Linux option. Metadata is save as a couple of big text files (audio, video, photos). Only gets tumblr hosted media.  

Option 3 - tumblr-utils. This has been the method that I’ve been using the most over the last several days. It’s more challenging to use, as it requires Python (which is a coding language that I have never touched until Wednesday) and using Terminal, but the instructions are fairly straightforward. I know next to nothing but am pretty good at copying and pasting things other people have done. There were a few times when I was pretty sure I was going to crash my entire system (I didn’t), but once I got everything in place, it works really well. It grabs everything with some additional to the command line, has a really nice organization style and will tell you quickly if you’ve made a mistake. I used it to download a complete backup of my tumblr and my likes, as well as backing up a bunch of fanart blogs. Here’s another user’s experience. I really recommend reading over exactly what the app can do and deciding what you want before executing it.  Pros: Works for Mac as well as Windows. Nicely organized. Can download all images, video (both tumblr hosted and elsewhere) and audio (although you have to specify that you want audio and video). Can also just grab by blog type (photo,text,quote, etc), or by tag. Incremental, scheduled updates where it looks for new posts to download without going through the whole thing again. No data limits.  Cons: kinda terrifying to use if you’re a newbie at all of this. If you organize in directories, it doesn’t weed out any duplicates, so your folder in the end will be much larger. Complicated for newbies to computer programming, but instructions are pretty straight-forward. If you are just looking to download certain tags, it browses through the entire blog (one person had 192,000 blog posts that it slogged through to grab 16 art posts).

Option 4 - RipMe. This one works in Java - I didn’t know Java was anything more than something that made videos play. I downloaded and played with it last night, and it really does a great job of extracting all of the media files from your blog. It doesn’t get text files or anything. I’ve run into problems with exceeding Tumblr’s API limit and then it gives me errors. Follow the instructions to set up and use herePros: Quick downloader of pictures and videos. Simple organization. Works on both Mac/Windows. Works on other sites besides tumblr (I used it on deivantart yesterday).  Cons: data limits - if you have a blog larger than ~ 5K posts, it’s going to take a long time, with several breaks, to download everything. No extra information, no text files or HTML, so if your picture was part of a fanfic, you won’t have preserved the fic. 

Option 5 - backup_tumblr. This one I haven’t played around with much, because I had found other options before this started circulating around. It requires python/terminal as well, but it’s a much more straight forward installation. It will only download your own blog/sideblogs because it requires you to create an authentication key (I didn’t know what that meant either). I also ran into problems with data limits - you can apparently email tumblr and ask for a data limit exception but I have no idea how responsive they are to those kind of requests. I’ve downloaded metadata for my blog and likes, but I haven’t actually tried to download the media files yet because of the data limit (which won’t be lifted for me until tomorrow).  Pros: Straight-forward instructions. Minimal computer expertise needed. Grabs likes as well. Creator was very responsive to questions. Download looks  formatted to easily move to another blog if needed. Works on both Mac/Windows. Cons: Data limits will affect ability to backup a larger blog. I couldn’t figure out how to register an API (but I got it figured out and it was such an easy thing that I’m more than a little embarrassed about it). 

Option 6 - Wordpress. I reblogged “import you tumblr into wordpress” instructions the other day, set up my wordpress blog, clicked the importer, and watched as it did nothing. I’m still at 0/16700 progress. Last night, I did some searching to find out why and the short answer: my tumblr is too big. Wordpress allows 6GB of space and my blog is at least 40GB. Unfortunately, it seems like the program just dies rather than telling you what’s wrong. Even if you were to buy a “premium account” with wordpress, they only allow you 10GB of space. I own my own domain and webspace on a business plan, and even that only has 100GB available. I might try moving mine over, but it’s not going to work for the basic user. ADDENDUM: got an email that my blog transfer was too large, but it’s still spinning and marked as “in-progress”. The latest message on their support forum states that free blogs are limited to 3GB, which probably isn’t going to work for most. Looks like it downloaded ~5000 of my posts. Pros: the importer tool is really simple - just one button to click and it does all the rest. Will download all media (both tumblr and non-tumblr hosted).  Cons: Not enough space to transfer and host a full tumblr on wordpress.com. Still an option if you host your own.  

***

Other things: I haven’t found any programs that will download drafts, which may or may not be a big deal to you. I also haven’t found a way to download notes, so if a lot of your conversation has been done in the notes, that will be lost. Tumblr download will grab your messages in an XML, which again looks ugly but it’s all there. 

you don’t gotta tell me to boycott the Nintendo prices by not buying bc i don’t have the money to get them anyways

‘guys don’t spend 600-700 dollars on the new nintendo products to send a message’ im way ahead of you man

The biggest misconception in public schools is that literary analysis is about proving you can be right or wrong about a book you read

Literary analysis isn’t about the book

It’s not even about being right

It’s about performing an investigation and presenting your case to the jury

It doesn’t matter if your defendant killed that guy or not. If you can convince the jury he didn’t, you’ve won

And the incredible life skill of spinning bulletproof bullshit out your ass with a handful of facts and a prayer is soooooooo much more valuable than anyone’s ever gonna tell you

Bullshitting is becoming a lost art

😔 Another industry lost. Should have bought stock in Grifting

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What the media won't show

It’s actually pretty nuts how there is no real mass media coverage of the protests that are happening all over the US. It demonstrates fairly conclusively that the unlawful activities at the White House aren’t just limited to Trump. There’s a lot of wealthy people in powerful positions in the US and around the world helping to support the dismantling of the US federal government.

Dear Applicant, Thank you for applying for the team member position at our company, We carefully reviewed your skills and qualifications and have decided you are so epic and so fucking cool and we are going to hire you and give you one bilion dollars because we like you so much

there's like a thousand posts about it on this site but it bears reiterating that the reason a lot of Americans will specify which state they come from rather than simply saying that they are from the US is simple. it's because, despite the relative physical proximity, someone from Massachusetts and someone from New York are basically two wholly different breeds of person. and neither is human.

Official Post of Massachusetts

Also Boston and NYC are farther apart than Geneva and Milan

You ever look at some art your mutual made and you just sit there in stunned silence and awe that one of your friends is out there making jaw-dropping beautiful art just for the hell of it

How it feels when your friend who you have wacky and silly conversations and jokey-joke haha times with makes something that's so good it changes your brain chemistry

Expression is sacred, and imagination is not illegal, but when your imagination is not from the soul, and expressed with stolen talents, then you don't deserve protection, but only punishment.

A MARTYR?????

GIRL WHAT RIGHTEOUS CAUSE DO YOU DIE FOR

i looked into this a bit more and studio ghibli didnt even send him a cease and desist. he faked the letter. hes pretending at being a martyr because.... if i were to guess, business is slow lol. what a loser

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