How to Export All Your Medium Content
The do’s and don’ts of backing up your Medium account
I’ve been a fan of Medium since 2018 and at the time of writing this article I’ve published nearly 200 stories, written over 250 comments, and still have 60 drafts as a queue.
However, the reality of the situation is Medium has not been as lucrative as it was in its heyday and I have concerns about its longevity. So I sought out looking for a way to make sure I don’t lose all my contributions and wanted to share my findings with the Medium community.
The tl;dr is that Medium makes the process very easy for you; however, what they offer is very limiting unless your only intention is to upload to Google Drive and be done with it.
In this article we’ll go through the recommended way to export all your Medium content, then also have a discussion about the (lack of) other options and the limitations of the recommendation.
How to Export All Your Medium Content
We’ll start with the good news. This process is incredibly easy. All you need to do is click on your profile icon then choose Settings > Security & Apps > Download your information. You’ll be presented with a small popup explaining you’ll be emailed a link to download your export, which will be in a zip file format. Voila!
Once you unzip the export, you’ll see several folders and a README file explaining what each one contains. Here’s a few of my observations that will help expedite your understanding of what was exported.
- All files are in HTML format
- The directory
/posts/has stories, drafts, and comments - The directory
/claps/has one or many HTML files that lists all your posts with their clap count. - The directory
/users-following/lists all the users you follow, not those who follow you
Your followers are not included, but here’s a link to an article detailing how to export them.
The Alternatives…or Lack Thereof
If for whatever reason this one-time export isn’t satisfactory for your needs, you probably searched for things like “Medium API” or “Medium GET stories”. I know I did. So here’s what I learned about alternatives to the above process.
- It’s possible to set up automations posting to Medium, but exporting/retrieval is very limited
- The Medium API does not have a method to request an individual article
- The only programmatic approach I found was using an RSS feed
The Limitations of Medium’s All-in-One Export
Finally, let’s talk about what you can/can’t do with Medium’s export structure.
- Medium gives you almost everything under the sun regarding your account, which is great as a backup.
- The structure of the export and the format of the individual files makes it very difficult to import your Medium content into another platform or even a simple spreadsheet
- Information such as claps and articles are dissociated making it hard to meaningfully group your data
I hope this article helped you export your data and gave you a better understanding of what you can and cannot do with the export. This was a good first step for me, but I want to do more with my exported content so I’ll continue searching and tinkering.