Substack: Exporting Your Data.
On Best Practices and Backups.
Are you backing up your Substack and Medium data regularly? If not, here's a quick guide on how to export your data from Substack.
Substack
Go to Dashboard > Settings→Exports
Select ‘Create new Export,’ if you are using it for the first time or click the download button after the file is created.
After the Download button is available, select it to automatically download a compressed (zip) file on your computer, in the Downloads folder. Substack automatically names the file with a random filename, so consider moving it to a backup folder named with the download date. It would have been nice if they appended the date to the filename, but they don’t.
Pro-tip: Create folders exclusively for your Substack publication backups on your computer, and title the folder for the day of download. Then, move the .zip file to that folder. This way your backups are auto-organized by date. Above, the zip file is in my feb26 folder.
Double-click on the .zip file, and it automatically unpacks the compressed folder, creating three files in the same folder. See below image.
The three files are your data files:
email_list.publicationname.csv: Contains subscriber information including payment status and subscription details.posts: A folder containing multiple files, including your content posts.posts.csv: An index file listing all posts, both published and unpublished, along with their paywall status and other relevant details.
The ".csv" extension denotes a comma-separated values file format, which is commonly used for data exports.
This format is compatible with various spreadsheet software tools such as Excel or Numbers.
When you open a ".csv" file, it will typically load into whichever spreadsheet software is set as your default application for handling such files.
Email List
This file contains the important list of subscribers with key information about their payment and status of subscription.
This enables you to monitor your unsubscription rates, because it shows the "email_disabled" field which indicates subscribers who have unsubscribed, providing valuable insights into churn rates and user engagement.
Pro-tip: While this data reflects subscriber monetization metrics, you can also export subscribers engagement metrics from the Subscriber dashboard.
Content Posts
The content posts within the "posts" folder typically consist of three files per post, each sharing a numerical prefix. See below image for my
publication data exported today.
a. The delivers and opens named files are .csv files, that carry specific info on regarding post deliveries and openings just as indicated. The files are spreadsheets that indicate metrics per post, including subscription status, geographical location data, and browser and mobile device used for accessing your publication.
The ".delivers" file displays the email addresses of subscribers to whom the post was delivered, indicating whether the post was paywalled and the subscription status (free/paid) of the reader. It should correlate with the ‘Delivered’ on your subscriber dashboard for post.
See below image of the file header.
The ".opens" file contains a comprehensive list of subscribers to whom the post was delivered, along with the number of times each subscriber opened the file and their respective location and device details.
This data is expected to correlate with the 'Views' metric displayed on your subscriber dashboard for each post.
See below image of the file header.
These files are only useful if you wish to do a granular slicing of the data.
If you are a beginner and curious, I would recommend just using the ‘Export’ data filters on your Subscriber dashboard.
b. The third file with the same numerical prefix as the other files, but with a ".html" suffix, contains the text of the post with the corresponding title. For example, you might encounter a file named "XXXXXXXXX_Meeting_the_Naturalized_US_Citizen_at_JFK.html" for a post titled "Meeting the Naturalized US Citizen at JFK," where X stands for a randomly generated unique number. When opened, this file will display the post's content in a browser window. However, it will appear as a plain text file without any formatting, as it lacks the styling and layout typically found on the original publication platform.
See my article ‘Meeting the Naturalized US Citizen at JFK.’ and see the screenshot of the html file opened in the browser.
Pro-tip: You can save your posts formatted as shared in this post which will preserve the format, and engagement on your post in terms of likes, and comments.
List of Posts aka as an Index File.
Your exported data is conveniently organized in the 'posts.csv' file.
The collated information is useful if you wish to host a 'Start Here' page in the future, or to remind your subscribers, whether free or paid, of the content they may have missed in previous months.
Additionally, the 'Type' column categorizes the content as podcast, video, or newsletter, providing a comprehensive overview of your publication's offerings.
It includes both your published and unpublished (aka drafts) content posts, its paywall status, title, subtitle, and the podcast link if any.
Type field shown below would contain the type of your content: whether it is a podcast, video, or newsletter if you publish all three types of content.
Pro-tip: You can duplicate this file, and use it as an index to your online archive, adding new columns that help you identify content type, section, and frequency for use as a content management and scheduling system.
Bonus Tip
You can only create only one ‘export download’ file at a time, as Substack overwrites the previous export.
If you write often, create and download weekly.
Else, once a month suffices.
But ensure you have downloaded the previous export file created before you create a new one.
Medium allows you to do a similar backup, but more on that in another post.
Caveats
The urls of the posts are not preserved so you may need to add it separately using the sitemap index for your publication (Check publicationname.substack.com/sitemap.xml). You may be able to use an automated tool to scrape the urls. Substack should simply provide this in the future.
The backups will not have any likes, comments etc. for your posts. Again, an oversight by Substack. The best way to gathe this information is to ensure your notifications are turned for email so the comments and likes are directly preserved in your email. Filter your email folder automatically to avoid this swamping your Inbox. See this post for how:
Conclusion
Backing up your Substack data is essential for preserving your content and subscriber information.
If you ever suspect platform issues, you can go back to the last preserved backup to add or edit your subscriber info manually in the dashboard.
Follow these steps to ensure you have a copy of your data offline on your local drive or private cloud system.
If you found this guide helpful, please consider pledging your support to
so I can continue providing more of these curated insights and tech tips for free to benefit a larger group, rather than paywall articles. You can also buy me a coffee! Thank you.
It's disappointing that it doesn't seem to retain any formatting for content. Is there a way to export with logical markup <h1> etc?
Thanks for showing this feature. As an engineer I like backups of everything I run. Just did my fist export of packagemain.tech