How can i download my tumblr archive

so ive been using 3rd party backup software to backup this blog (its now been almost half a year and my official export still hasnt finished processing). if any of u guys havent done that yet i would personally recommend tumblr-utils to do so!

tumblr-utils main competitor (in my eyes anyway) is tumblthree. both of them essentially do the same thing. they crawl thru your blog (or someone elses blog. or all the posts uve liked. or even tumblrs tags!) and download the post data associated with it. however, theres one major reason why tumblr-utils wins in my eyes.

the big reason why tumblr-utils wins out over tumblthree is that tumblr-utils not only backups your blog data but leaves it as an actual archive. if you were to upload the files that tumblr-utils gives you to another website, you would be left with something that someone would recognize as a blog. what i mean by this is tumblr-utils downloads all of your metadata, just like tumblthree, but arranges them into .html files with css that leaves them as barebones tumblr posts. heres an example:

(yes i did tag this as scopophobia. 2014 was a different time)

see, thats a tumblr post! it even has when it was originally posted, how many notes it has, and a link to the original post in the form of that circle icon up at the top. for what i need, this is perfect. in five years down the line i can open some of these posts again and relive the tumblr experience, regardless of if tumblr is still around.

however, tumblr-utils isnt perfect. its biggest caveat is that you have to use the command prompt to get any of this to work. however, for the most basic blog archiving as seen above, the link i provided earlier is perfect. you only have to input three commands to start downloading. if your blog is massive (over 42k posts at the time of this writing), you may have to get slightly more finicky or specific, which is where this youtube tutorial comes in! i think the scariness of the command line is being over-exaggerated, but there may be other reasons why you might turn to tumblthree instead.

tumblthree is a legit alternative. its main advantage over tumblr-utils is its actual interface. all of the command line funnybusiness is left to the program itself, only telling you what you want to know. there are also a ridiculous amount of options as to what you actually want to download from your blog. it allows you to download multiple blogs at once, stop and start the download at any time, throttle your bandwidth so you dont destroy your data limit, and much more. most of these features are impossible in tumblr-utils, and if they are you really do have to do some command-line wizardry. 

but…heres the thing. tumblthree gives you, in my opinion, no actual ARCHIVE of your blog. it can give you the most specific arrangement of your blogs data that you would ever want, but its not…usable in a real way. itll download all of your blogs videos and photos, but when it comes to text posts and post formats? heres an example of what itll give you

thats nothing to me, frankly. to someone who actually knows how tumblr’s backend works this is probably perfect, but based on the limited research that ive done theres no real way to turn this raw data into a readable blog experience. tumblthree is a much more powerful crawler than tumblr utils by an order of magnitude, but its end result is incomprehensible to a joe-shmo like me. as a tumblr user who wants to preserve the tumblr experience more than the data, tumblr utils is the clear winner

but thats just my take! i hope that this rundown has made the process of finally getting off this hellsite a little easier. if you feel like ive misrepresented either program here please let me know!