Substack NEEDS a Real Backup Solution

Missing your most important site security net.

See what Substack is seriously lacking regarding backups, and what you need to do to secure your content and email list.

Why Backups are So Important

Full backups that are stored offsite, and can be restored, are your site’s most important security feature.

Period.

No matter what digital hell breaks loose, you will be able to restore your site to full functionality.

And digital catastrophes happen ALL the time.

I say this from having been a webmaster for the last 20 years who has helped folks recover from:

• Hosts being down for days

• Hack attack

• Updates that get borked

• User error – change of setting or clicking the wrong thing

How You Can Lose Your Content on Substack

A single settings change can wipe out all of your content.

That includes settings that are not in the Danger Zone area of your settings, like removing a feature.

Merging two Substack accounts together, if you merge the wrong direction to the empty one, can wipe out your content.

You Need a Full Backup

Your backup should include everything:

• Content

• Images

• Comments

• Share counts

What You’re Missing

On WordPress sites, backing up only the database does not get everything in the list above. The images would be missing. So would some plugin data, including some settings.

Substack’s manual backup is like a database backup on WordPress, but it’s missing a lot more.

Did you know that only your text content is available in a Substack manual download?

You’re missing:

• Images

• Comments

• Stats

The “Build on Land You Own” Myth

You don’t own any platform where you publish content – not even WordPress.

See my post How “Build on Land You Own” is Limiting You to see the only two things you actually “own”.

And the makers of Substack do consider this platform to be land that you own because you “own” your content.

Let me tell you something.

Owning the copyright to the content you post is NOT the same as owning the content.

If you don’t have a full backup, stored separately from the hosting where it is published, that you can restore at will, you do NOT own your content.

Every Other Blog Platform Has Real Backups

Let’s have a look at what other blogging platforms offer for backups.

WordPress

The host has a daily backup that you can use to restore your full site or just parts of it. These backups are not guaranteed, which is why you need to set up your own backup solution, like using the UpdraftPlus plugin and storing on AS3. See this Backup Checklist post on the main BlogAid site for details.

Wix

According to this Wix post, there is currently no way to do an external backup of your site. But, it is backed up by the host every time it changes, and you can restore it to an older version on demand. But, you can duplicate your site.

Weebly

Weebly has a tutorial for how to back up your site, and another tutorial for how to restore you site from an archive file. This archived file is one you have to manually create, and it will be emailed to you. There are third-party services that offer an automated way of doing it.

Squarespace

There is no direct backup or restore on Squarespace. But they do offer the opportunity to easily “Duplicate Site” with one click (I have not seen how to restore this yet). They also allow an XML export, but it is missing items, like images. But there are third-party services that offer full backups, like Backupery.

Shopify

There are all kinds of internal ways to backup your whole store or just parts of it. Plus, there are multiple Apps that automate the backup and store it off site.

What Can You “Backup” on Substack

You can manually export your posts.

• This is just text content.

• There are no images.

• You can’t restore it to Substack.

• You can’t read it without a special file type translator.

You can manually export your subscriber list.

• You can re-upload this to Substack.

• You should manually do this export at least monthly, especially if you have a paid Publication.

Workarounds

I did a deep dive into Substack backup solutions listed online.

Here are the two most popular ones I found, but I don’t deem them worth doing, especially since you can’t use the backup to restore your Substack site.

• Using GitHub and AS3

• Syncing drafts with a Chrome extension

There were other ideas that I found which were even less promising.

One of the reasons why there are no viable third-party backups for Substack is that they don’t provide an API and don’t plan to do so.

That said, I have found devs who use a “secret” API method, including a new Python encoded package. But it is not officially supported. And it doesn’t include a backup method, just other data collection.

I suspect the reason Substack has never publicly released an API is to stymie developers from making SaSS products to auto publish or such on the platform, but that’s just a guess.

Recover Draft Posts

If you search for Substack backups, you’ll eventually see a tutorial from Substack on how to restore a post draft, which is their autosave version of your posts.

Well, that’s something.

I haven’t tested it yet, but I assume the link at least stays the same.

I don’t know what happens to the publish date, though. And since your Publication’s home page can layout posts in a grid, that’s going to bork the date order on them if it changes. So, if you run a series or such, that could be problematic.

Create Drafts Elsewhere

Here’s one way to ensure that you at least have a copy of your content, even if it is in draft form.

No matter which website platform I use, I always create my content on either Google Docs or Word first.

That way I have a copy no matter what, and it is backed up to the cloud or to my third-party PC backup vendor. (I like Backblaze.)

You also want to have a copy of your images and videos. And ensure you put the file name of them in your content draft, so you know which post they belong to.

We Need a REAL Backup Solution

As a webmaster, I consider not having a solid backup solution to be a security issue – a serious one.

I contacted Substack support – if you can call support going around in circles with a chatbot.

I finally asked to have this issue escalated to a human. The bot complied.

But I have ZERO hope of getting a response much less a solution.

Ask For It

It’s going to take a chorus of voices raised with Substack to get any real movement on this.

If nobody speaks up, they think nobody considers it an issue.

And maybe you don’t – right up until you lose everything.

If Substack is your bank – meaning you make money from the platform – then you NEED to protect your investment.

And the very best way to do that is to have a full backup, store offsite, that you can restore on demand.

Contact Substack Support.

Do it now.

Demand a real backup solution.

Or, Restack this post and include an @Substack Team mention in it.