Fun Size Bytes

December 10, 2009

The Tumblr Backup app is ready for its first beta testing.

(There’s a lot more to this announcement at the original link.)

Wow.

First of all, understand that for all its years and popularity, even Flickr doesn’t have a “backup” app. Imagine the day when Flickr announces it is shutting down and you have 30 days to get all your stuff out of it. Do I expect that to happen? No. Could it? Yes.

The biggest feature?

You can launch the app every few days and re-run the backup in the same place, and it effectively performs an incremental media backup: image and audio files are only re-downloaded if they don’t already exist in the target folder. Text content and post data are re-downloaded in full every time.

So you can run this, say, every Monday, and only download the latest stuff.

It’s not perfect yet (this is a beta, Mac only at the moment, and doesn’t backup photosets yet) but it’s 100% better than what we had yesterday.

The end result is a set of files that you could use to move your Tumblr to a completely different system (i.e. if Tumblr exploded tomorrow and all your content was gone).

A lot of what I post to Tumblr is ephemeral and I wouldn’t mind losing it. Some is not.

This makes using Tumblr for “important” writing a lot more of a possibility, because you don’t have to worry too much about being “locked in”.

Bravo, Tumblr.

2:07pm | URL: http://funsizebytes.com/post/277815601/tumblr-backup

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