Wednesday 29 June 2016

An Important Warning: Thinking of Backing Up Your Tumblr Account by Importing into Wordpress? DON’T!!!


Hi Folks

I know many of you will have Tumblr accounts - and I know many of you who DO will, like me, be becoming increasingly alarmed at the the number of deactivated accounts encountered and be searching for ways to back up your precious Tumblr content.  I also know many of you will likely own - in addition to your Tumblr account - a Wordpress account and will possibly have seen the idea of importing your Tumblr content into Wordpress mooted as a way of creating a quick, clean, backup.  Well, here is an important warning to anyone who has a Wordpress account and is considering backing up their precious Tumblr content by importing it into their Wordpress account - just DON’T!!!

Earlier this morning I decided to try to back up my Tumblr account in just this way, by importing it into my Wordpress account.  All started ok, then after a few minutes the import process ground to a halt and the following message popped up:

"Your site has been suspended from WordPress.com for violating the Terms of Service".

Basically I have now lost my Wordpress account.  Luckily I have never used it much and there was very little on it (I could never quite get to grips with how it worked)  but I think everyone who owns a Tumblr account and is becoming worried about the danger of its deactivation needs to be aware of this potential danger and be VERY wary of importing into Wordpress as a method of backing up Tumblr.

Garth Toyntanen

PS: Please pass this around via social media, repost, reblog or whatever - ta!

2 comments:

Watson said...

That's a great warning.

People end up putting years of content online without really thinking through who controls that data and it's access.

I think WordPress is great, but like lots of things it takes time to understand it's structure. It is a significant time-synch to start. But it is ubiquitous with support everywhere.

I'm guessing you are referring to having had an account at WordPress.com.

There are many restrictions there, most of which people do not understand until their account is blocked.

In my opinion it is very important for any person who cares about their content to have their own site. This can be done quite cheaply these days. From there one can use a variety of platforms, including WordPress, with a copy from WordPress.ORG (not .com) and not have to worry at all about WordPress's terms or service.

Toyntanen said...

That seems like good advice, Watson. I've just been taking a look at the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org and the problem I'm going to have with the latter is the learning curve and the time it would take. Perhaps when I get a book out. I have so many part-finished projects on the go I really do have to make a concerted effort to get at least SOMETHING out to generate an income. All I was really trying to do today was back-up my Tumblr account. So often nowadays I find myself following links just to find that old 'account deactivated' message it's getting worrying, so I was looking for ways to create some sort of safeguard and one way that I've read about is to use WordPress's 'Import' facility to import from Tumblr so if nessesary at a later date the backup copy can then be exported back to a new Tumblr account or similar. As I said, I've never done more with my WordPress account than muck about and make a few experimental entries. Today was my first attempt to use it since 2013. The 'account blocked' message came up SO fast it has to be some sort of automatic vetting facility, probably based on certain keywords or tags; within seconds of completing the import infact; THAT fast!