Tumblr Backup That Works | Hacker News Reader

Tumblr Backup That Works

tumblr.downstreamapp.com

Feature that would be useful: When tumblr goes down, redirect to the backup pages automatically. Sort of like a just in case for tumblr. Would be worth the money for most businesses, and would require very little investment in terms of hosting. Spin up a bunch of amazon servers or something and throw it all up on there. Spin down when things have settled down for an hour or two.

I just run this one liner as an hourly cron job, Tumblr doesn't seem to mind. It gets all my images and other Tumblr hosted media, too.

  httrack "http://myhost.tumblr.com" -O "/path/to/tumblr_backup" "+*.media.tumblr.com/*" "+*.myhost.tumblr.com/*" -N100 -I0 -c2 -%c2 --update

(You'll end up with index-2.html as your top level index so you may want to make a symlink to index.html -- add this line to the above shell script:

  ln -s /path/to/tumblr_backup/index-2.html /path/to/tumblr_backup/index.html

...OR make an alias along the same lines in your webserver conf. This is an artifact of telling httrack to exactly mirror the tumblr paths and telling it not to build a generic httrack index file of its own.)

Thanks for the comments on our Tumblr Backup. Right now we're focusing on one-time backup but will quickly be offering daily/weekly backups not much later.

Yes - we can do this yourself. There's people that feel comfortable doing that but there's many more that don't.

As for Tumblr providing a backup solution, yes they have but it (1) doesn't usually work, (2) only works on a Mac, and (3) still in beta, (4) hasn't been updated since 2009, etc...

@mootothemax - we'll work on providing more details on the site here soon. Thanks for asking for that.

@ZackOfAllTrades - like the idea of providing an automatic site up if/when Tumblr goes down.

It would be nice to have some more details about precisely what this does; is the backup a zip archive, or something that can be directly imported into Wordpress but not Posterous... or something else entirely? And is this a one-time backup, or for the life of the blog? (I presume the latter from the pricing per blog).

Looks good and has me interested though, that's half the battle :)

If it's for the life of the blog, I don't think anyone would have a problem paying a one-time fee. I'd also be interested in hearing if you can import posts back into Tumblr as well. (This would be useful for people who want to clone a secondary blog into a primary)

EDIT: Based on the signup page[1], there are a handful of steps that likely represent what you'll do when you backup the blog. They seem to indicate more of a one-and-done process.

[1]http://tumblr.downstreamapp.com/sign-up/

Does the official Tumblr backup app not work? Why?

I've never had the chance to try it since there isn't a Windows version.

I have 2000 image posts on my Tumblr and the Tumblr Backup App gives the cryptic error: "Error during backup: API request failed. Please check your internet connection or try again". If I try to back-up a different tumblr with only 100 text-posts it continues without any problem.

Is that 9.95 per backup or per account with unlimited backups?

@bennesvig - that price is for a one time backup of your blog. Daily/Weekly backups coming later.

If that works with the high price I will be surprised.

Do you have a Tumblr blog? If so, what price would you pay to back it up?

If the answer is "No" to the first, or an equivalent of "free" to the second, why bother saying that the price is too high? Surely we should only advise on prices when it's for something that we would actually like to buy?

Yes and I back it up myself by simple wgetting it every now and then.

I was not saying it was too high, I simply consider it quite high. It would be too high for me, that is more than I pay for hosting (other site) monthly.

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