Devine chalice

Considering the situation, the very real possibility of being either entirely deleted or having many of our posts permanently removed, and considering that Tumblr’s own export feature is either not working or simply taking far too long for many people, I thought I’d share the method I’m using to backup the vast majority of content on my blogs.

TumblRipper is available for free, and enables you to download every single photo (including RAW photos), gifs and even video and audio files from your blog. It will attempt to name the files based on whatever is written in the description if you like, and can even be dedicated solely to original content. It only took me about an hour and a half to archive 18,459 photos (5.42gb), with only 120 of them failing.

You can download it here.

No installation is required, simply run the TumblRipperV3.exe and follow the steps as provided below:

(1) Click on file, settings, and choose your default download directory.

(2) Click on plugins, choose Tumblr from the drop-down menu and select your options. Enter the email associated with your Tumblr account followed by your current Tumblr password. Click “Make default settings” so in the event you encounter a problem you won’t need to select everything a second time, and click save.

(3) Click the + symbol on the dash and enter your complete Tumblr URL, then select Tumblr from the menu on the right. The information you entered previously should appear and fill in the relevant fields automatically. Choose a relevant title, make sure your email and password are correct and save again.

(4) Back on the dash, simply make sure the box below “Enabled” is ticked and press the start button. Make sure you have a stable (and preferably fast) internet connection, as it tends to get hung up sometimes and you may have to start from the beginning if it does. I recommend just letting it do its thing, closing other bandwidth hogging programs while waiting for it to finish etc. Also, please note that since this is freeware, each user is limited to entering a maximum of 3 websites (you can unlock this by donating to the developer, which I highly recommend). As a final note of precaution, I might also recommend changing your password after you’ve finished the download, as I can’t really speak to the security of your data (though I’ve never had any issues myself).

And that’s it. I really hope this will be of help to some of you. There’s so much unique, obscure, often personal or otherwise sentimental content on each and every one of our blogs that we should at least have some manner of preserving it, and while this solution is far from perfect, it’s a pretty good alternative for those of you who either don’t intend or are simply unable to export your blogs to something like wordpress or various other blogging platforms (something which seems incredibly difficult to accomplish and has many of its own flaws), as well as those who simply have too much content to even consider saving everything post by post.