I got a “First strike! Three strikes and you’re out!” copyright notice from Tumblr yesterday morning, and my first thought was, “Oh good, maybe I can totally forget about my Tumblr now.”

One of the biggest regrets of my online life is the gap half decade or so I moved most of my blogging activity over to Tumblr from this self-hosted WordPress blog. Tumblr (and Twitter) has been my public notebook — there are blog tags there that have become book chapters and many more that still might. If they delete my Tumblr, it’s a decade of public research gone bye-bye.

Believe it or not, you can actually back up your Tumblr blog now direct from their site. My blog took all night to export and the download wound up weighing in at 3.75GB. (The biggest surprise was all the .mp3 files that came through: they made a 10-hour playlist in iTunes!)

You can also download your Twitter archive and it comes with a handy index.html file that you can search and browse.

All this stuff will go away one day. Like I said in Show Your Work!:

Own your turf, own your turf, own your turf. (And try to back up whatever you’ve posted to turf you don’t own.)