Tumblr is a great blogging service. It works well, and the UI is great, but they have been extremely unstable lately. For some people, twenty-three consecutive hours of downtime is unacceptable. Well, Tumblr understands that, and that’s why they allow users to take everything they’ve ever posted on Tumblr, and then put it somewhere else.
If you head over to the Tumblr Goodies page, you’ll find a little application for Mac OS X called Tumblr Backup (.zip file). Unzip it, drag it to your applications folder, double click, and then log in.
From there, you’ll be given a drop down menu to choose which of your Tumblr blogs you’d like to download. Pick where you’d like to save the data to, and then click the “Start Backup” button. Depending on how much you’ve posted, it could take quite a while to suck all of your content through the internet. Be patient, and you’ll soon have everything.
Even if you don’t plan on leaving Tumblr, this is a process you should probably do every couple weeks. You wouldn’t want to lose anything, would you? I didn’t think so.
