How to Really Back Up Your Medium (Posts, Images, and Subscribers)

I clicked Medium's export button this morning. 32 MB, 4,030 files, five and a half years of writing.

Then I opened the folder to see what I got.

The writing comes out cleaner than Substack's export does. The rest of it is a different story.

Export

Settings, then Security and apps, then "Download your information". You get an email with a link. Mine took a few minutes.

The zip comes with a README listing 16 folders: blocks, bookmarks, claps, highlights, interests, ips, lists, notes, posts, profile, pubs-following, reposts, sessions, topics-following, twitter, users-following.

One of those is your work. posts holds 28 of the 32 MB.

And 4,030 files is not 4,030 articles. Every comment you ever left is its own HTML file in there too, so the count is mostly conversation. The smallest one in my folder is 2021-08-23_----2caadbdea70.html, 2 KB, and the entire content is :-)

Where Medium does better than Substack: every file is a real page. Title in the head, subtitle, author, publish date, and the canonical link in the footer. Substack hands you body fragments with no title element at all, so you have to join them against a CSV to know what you're looking at. Here you double-click a file and it opens like an article.

Images

1,559 image tags in my posts folder. Zero image files in the whole export.

Same problem as Substack. Every one of them points back at cdn-images-1.medium.com, so the pages look complete on your laptop and stay complete right up until the account is gone.

But Medium adds a twist. The links don't point at your originals. 1,103 of mine point at /max/800/, another 421 at /max/1200/. Three made it to 2560. So even if you download every image by hand, you get the web-sized copy Medium built for the feed. Not the file you uploaded.

Which means the backup happens before you publish, not after. Write the draft somewhere local, keep the images next to it, then paste into Medium. Everything of mine lives in my own app first, with a copy in iCloud.

If you didn't do that, the…