As a creator, you likely understand the importance of backing up your work.
If not, I'll be glad to tell you that it's important to back up your work. 😉
Assuming you actually do back up your work … congratulations, you take your work and your creator journey seriously.
What I'm here to do today is make sure that your backups are actually useful.
Let's turn to my wife's creative journey for a bit.
My wife is many wonderful things.
One of those things is a writer of historical fantasy.
The fact that her books are so good is testament to her real superpower (in my eye) which is research.
She's taken recently to posting on Threads once a day with a decent multipart post on a reference book she's reading. She just crossed the 100-follower milestone and has a few dedicated history people who like and respond to pretty much everything she writes. Definitely a good way to be going.
I asked her if her work was backed up.
She told me no, she types the post directly into the Threads.
At that point I told her I'd investigate how to do that.
I tried backing up her posts a number of ways.
It took me a while to find something that worked — particularly because she has a lot of multipart posts.
Her main home feed (actually, everyone's, as afar as I know) only shows the first two parts of her posts.
Some of her posts have a dozen parts. When I click the More links on the posts, it opens the full post in another tab. So I can't expand all of the posts and just grab them all.
I found a couple of extensions that could have pulled things based on links, but they didn't work either.
I found a script that could possibly work, but the browser yelled and warned and threw up its hands tried to protect me from myself, so I quit that route.
Even Meta's “download my stuff” wasn't useful.
I then experimented with downloading information from my account. Once I got my own Threads posts, I realized that they weren't particularly useful for a few reasons:
- The posts and replies were in a file together in chronological order.
- There was no differentiating posts and replies.
- There was no context what post was being replied to.
- There was no linking of one post to the next in a multipart post.
Put another way, if my Threads history was a book, my downloaded information all of the paragraphs of that book in a pile without any meaningful order, or any or chapter headings. All of the words were there, but they weren't useful.
I'd be hard-pressed to reconstruct my feed from that archive.
And so would my wife, if for some reason her Threads account got suspended or deleted.
Not that she'd try to or mean to, but these things happen, and there often isn't a whole lot of recourse.
Here's what worked … and what we're doing now.
I ended up manually backing up her posts into a text document. With some help from ChatGPT, aka Chatty, I processed her posts into Markdown, a nice open plain-text format.
I also asked her to strongly consider saving off her work in a document for her future posts.
(It turns out that she did have a good reason for putting things directly in the Threads post form. She used it for character count and edited for length as she went. She's going to continue doing this, but before she posts she'll copy the text into a local document.)
All of this begs the question, though.
What's a good system to make sure that work is recoverable?
Local first.
Ever typed a lengthy reply into a web form, say for a job application, and the form eats your work after you click Submit?
That's happened to me far too many times. Once is too many, honestly!
Actually, for a really long time, I just typed posts into my WordPress editor. In later versions the interface got better and saved things locally, so even if something happened, often the work wouldn't vanish.
But it was risky.
Far better would have been to do what I do now, which is type my posts in Obsidian.
It's local first. My vault is synched to Dropbox, and then that's backed up again on cloud storage.
Also, it's plain text. About as open as it comes.
After the post is done in Obsidian, then it goes up to WordPress, and then to Medium or Substack.
If any of those vanish for whatever reason, I still have my work.
The best way to back up your posts is to back them up immediately as you write them, locally and on the cloud, in open formats.
Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash