One of the things that concerned me about moving my blog over to tumblr was the fact that it is an entirely cloud-based service. I definitely want to make sure that my writing is protected and easily accessible on my hard drive in case something were to happen to the tumblr servers. I would hate to lose years worth of entries.

What I started doing was copying and pasting my tumblr blog entries into separate Pages documents and saving them to a folder on my hard drive. This was workable, but clumsy. The other day, my friend Kevin Smith pointed me to an app on the tumblr Goodies page (a page I didn’t know existed) called Tumblr Backup. Right now it’s Mac only, but the page says a Windows version is coming.

I just installed and ran it for the first time, and it gets the job done, but could be improved. I like the simple interface. You just log in with your tumblr credentials, choose which blog you’d like to backup, and tell it where on your hard drive to store the backups.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like you can set it to backup automatically at specific times or at specific intervals, so it’s all manual. It also seems to put the entire website’s contents into a folder including images from posts, the contents of my “biography,” and of course each entry. Regrettably, each file is by itself in the folder. What I’d really like is for the app to display my blog as an offline database where every entry is collected in one place where I can just single click to see different entries.

Still, I’m glad for the backup solution, and I’m grateful to Kevin for point me to it!

UPDATE: Just noticed that the Tumblr Backup software is still in beta. That’s worth pointing out.