Back up Tumblr posts to XML files. (Doesn't save assets, like images and audio.)

backup.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
from urllib2 import urlopen
from urllib import urlretrieve
from os.path import basename
import sys 

def main(argv=None):
    if argv is None:
        argv = sys.argv

    if len(argv) < 2:
        print 'Usage: {0} username'.format(basename(__file__))

    username = argv[1]
    num = 50
    url = 'http://{0}.tumblr.com/api/read/'.format(username)

    page = urlopen(url)
    xml = page.read()
    soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(xml)
    total = int(soup.find('posts')['total'])

    for index, start in enumerate(range(0, total, num)):
        urlretrieve('{0}?start={1}&total={2}'.format(url, start, num), 'page{0}.xml'.format(index))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(main())