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We have been rolling out an API over the past couple weeks. You can see it here:

posterous.com/api

The next set of features here will be to allow reading of an entire posterous site. You will then be able to write tools to export/backup from posterous

excellent - thumbs up

I'd love to be able to export to Wordpress....

@Sachin, that is great to hear. You have a really great platform here. That will be terrific, and I can't wait to see what is coming next.

@Jeff, if you are a Mac user this is a really fast way to set up a simple backup with no developer chops required: http://kenclark.me/a-quick-and-easy-way-to-back-up-posterous-wit. It could certainly get way more sophisticated than this, but this will get you started.

+1 for backup (export) to WordPress WXR format, including all comments, tags, etc.

I've looked at the API, but I would like to do a *simple* backup of my blog using a Website mirroring/offline reader tool. However, all the tools I've tried get confused by the http://posterous.com/sso/verify redirect. Is there anything we can do about this? I'm assuming this problem doesn't affect search engines crawling posterous sites?

Yes, I want a local backup of all of my posts and media. This is the only thing that really keeps me from making Posterous my main site, so I hope there will be a tool for the API soon!

I chose Posterous over Tumblr, and love it so far, but the new Tumblr backup app released today has me a little jealous.

Can I just add my vote to please work on downloadable backups next?

thanks!

+1 on bups/archives/exports

Yep! Great service, i'm completely over from wordpress / blogger. A backup service would be a great for piece of mind! Keep up the good work guys!

Why is a full backup taking so long to implement? This is a pretty fundamental requirement, no? Sorry, I love posterous. But if you can't export and import a full blog, what's the point?

Ernie, what format would you want us to use for the backups? Where do we put all the videos and images? Where does the metadata like tags go?

Point is, there's no such thing as a "full backup" so we offer everything through the api, so you can get the data in any way you want.

In all due respect, how many users even know what the letters API means? I guess it wouldn't matter if tools are created using the API that are easy for the average user to use. Has anyone developed any so far?

I understand that it's complicated, and probably wouldn't be perfect, but when you look at this:

http://www.marco.org/277762675

claiming that it couldn't be done well rings a little hollow.

Yeah sorry I don't mean to sound unappreciative. Posterous is brilliant. And the API is helpful. But it really should have a straightforward export/import using the WordPress Extended WXR format (http://en.support.wordpress.com/export/) Wrapping all the images and videos up in a zip file would be great - but WXR at a minimum.

We could create a backup tool like Tumblr's, and maybe that does make sense, i'm not sure.

Thing is, what is the point of that backup? It's not like you can take it and dump it into Wordpress or another service. You would still need to develop something custom

@Sachin - there are all sorts of reasons for wanting a backup, not just so people can migrate from one service to another. Personally, I would just like the assurance that I have my own private backup of my content. As I'm mentioned before, I've previously just used tools like HTTrack Website Copier as they simply mirror everything, but they don't play well with Posterous. I have thought about writing something to work with the API, perhaps hosting something on Google's App Engine that others could use, but there is nothing of substance in that idea just yet. At the moment I periodically grab the output directly from the API. Not very elegant, but its better than nothing.

"Thing is, what is the point of that backup? It's not like you can take it and dump it into Wordpress or another service. You would still need to develop something custom"

Speaking for myself, I'm not expecting that much. I love posterous. I'm not looking into moving it into wordpress. Just some kind of simple backup of, or info dump in case of disaster, of my writing would be fine (pictures are also sent to flickr, so that's not a problem).

And I'm not against the using the API. If someone builds a simple tool through it that would be great.

Well, I spent a few hours after work this week putting this together...
http://www.backuperous.com

It's just a simple front end to the api so you can easily get the xml from your blog without having to type in the 'get' command manually. It will also grab your site id automatically, so you don't have to scrounge around for it.

But as Sachin points out, once you get the xml, you can't really do much with it unless you build something custom on top of it. At least you'll have a local copy, which is better than nothing.

I will probably eventually add an automatic download feature, so that you don't have to do the "Save As" step. Also, none of the media will be saved.

Hope someone will find this useful, at least until backupify adds posterous to their list.

Anthony, thank you so much! The xml can always be massaged later; it's good to have a backup now. :)

Hi Eph, thanks! I'm glad you can use it!

Hi,

I did a quick update so it automatically downloads the xml file now. It also does a quick check and lets you know if you typed in your blog name incorrectly.

Anthony, that's really awesome - thanks for sharing that.

Now if only there were a way to grab all of one's media (pix, images, etc.)... One idea is to parter with http://dropbox.com, to allow subscribers to serve content from a specified folder in their dropbox.

If there are any dropbox-ers out there, vote on it: https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/956/partner-with-posterous-com-to-archive-lif... I.E. instead of http://yourBlog.posterous.com serving images from http://files.posterous.com/yourBlog/FiOXo0MBGsxn5XYLPy6wp2YDNfhLk8k9C1zHI06K1..., why synch that yourBlog folder with one in your dropbox?

...er that's "why *not* synch that yourBlog folder with one in your dropbox."

Anthony - is there any way for your to extend backuperous to cycle through more pages? i.e. the max number of pages the API will return is 50 in one call. My posterous account currently spans 4 x 50 calls (= 4 xml files).

Without authenticating, I don't think you can query the API to check the number of post, but if you cycle through x number of posts per call, if will return this when there are no more pages to return:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rsp>
</rsp>

Are you doing it manually now? I can't find anything in the api instructions that tell you how to specify which post numbers to read (e.g. 51-100 or 101-150).

You have to tell the API how many posts per page. My blog has 187 posts.

The following gives me the 50 most recent:

http://posterous.com/api/readposts?hostname=chieftech&num_posts=50&page=1

This gives me the next 50:

http://posterous.com/api/readposts?hostname=chieftech&num_posts=50&page=2

Or you can grab individual posts, again starting with the latest first - this gives me my very first post:

http://posterous.com/api/readposts?hostname=chieftech&num_posts=1&page=187

Does that make sense?

Thanks James. I misunderstood the API instructions. I apologize for the oversight, but I think it's functional as a backup tool now.

Enter your subdomain and it will automatically pull all your posts. 50 posts per page, but all the pages will be appended together into one file. The total number of pages (not including the empty last one) will be appended to the download file's name.

Brilliant! Looks like its all there :-) Thanks.

Big thanks for this tool. Very useful.

Just to push my earlier request for instant backups via Dropbox, wanted to point out that the Dropbox developers expect to launch a full API sometime this month: https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/9/dropbox-api

Hi everyone,

I'm glad you can use Backuperous. I'm taking suggestions for improvements/bugs on my blog post, at least until my app gets obsoleted.

http://www.backuperous.com

http://www.inforift.com/backuperous-an-exercise-in-execution

Thank you for the tool, Anthony!

I'm still looking for the official backup tool from Posterous which should include all files attached.

I'm also wishing for a way out of Posterous should I ever decide to leave. I'd really like to know that transporting my content won't be an enormous headache.

agreed something official in needed

"Roll your own export software" is not an acceptable solution.

If you have a Mac, you can use this simple tool: http://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/posterous-backup/id415889466?mt=12

More than 2 years have passed since a request for a simple, complete database backup/transfer system for Posterous was requested.

I have over the years passed up Posterous for several projects because there is no way to export to Wordpress. I think Posterous could be great as a way of starting up a blog, and once the needs outgrow Posterous (for example, a shopping cart is needed) the site could migrate to Wordpress or elsewhere.

Posterous could be awesome as an incubator for content driven sites, but not right now.

Keeping users loyal by not making it simple to back-up and then migrate when they need to has, at least in my case, kept users away from Posterous in the first place.

So, what's the state of all this right now?

Completely agree with Magda.

Wow. I've just wasted two hours with some Posterous backup tool (http://riduidel.posterous.com/tag/posterousbackup) just to find out that the request rate limit on the API v2 is so abysmally low that it can't be used for backups. Come on, it shouldn't be too difficult to make an "export" option!