10th
Backup app good, rich API better
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.
What TJ said. This is a great thing Tumblr has done and I highly approve.
However, it’s worth noting that Flickr provides a rich enough API that it’s fairly straightforward to build a backup app for that service. A quick search shows that there are already quite a few available. Tumblr’s API, on the other hand, is quite shallow by comparison.
Flickr was actually one of the first web services to provide data portability features. In 2006 they announced that they would allow competing web apps to import photostreams, making it easy for their users to switch to another service. (The only requirement was that the competitor provide the same access in the other direction; i.e. it had to be just as easy for users to switch back.)
I guess my point is that while the Tumblr Backup app is a very good thing and I’m happy to have it, I’d much rather they built and supported a rich API so I could do whatever I want with my data, even—no, especially—things Tumblr hasn’t thought of yet.
