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PSA - How to Export your Tumblr Blog

Remember a few months ago when it felt like every single website in existence updated their privacy policy? That was because of GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation from the EU.

Another part of GDPR? Right of access / right to data portability. 

What this means is that if you ask for it, companies are to give you access to your data so that you could theoretically move it to another service. Many companies have done this by allowing you to export your data and download it. Even if a company doesn’t provide an automated way, you should still be able to contact them and they should provide your data - it doesn’t have to be automatically generated and downloadable.

Tumblr does provide an automated way to export your blog. This should be done individually for each sideblog as well, if you want. (These are instructions for the website - not the app.)

Go to your blog settings page, ie https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/<your-blog-name>.

Look for the Export section (currently at the bottom)

Click the “Export <your-blog-name>” button.

Depending on the size of your blog, it may take a while to generate the export. It will say that it’s processing, and you can reload the page and come back later to check if it’s done.

When your export is processed and ready, the Export section will have a button to download.

Once you’ve downloaded the file, extract it to a folder on your computer. It will contain:

A media folder with images, gifs, videos, and audio files.

A messages xml file. Your messages are in here, even if it doesn’t look “human readable” and is gibberish to you, I promise. There are tools that will “beautify” xml to make it more readable.

A posts.zip file. Extract this and you’ll see an html folder that has an html file for each of your posts.