How to Really Back Up Your Medium (Posts, Images, and Subscribers)
It knows my IP history. Not my subscribers.
I clicked Medium's export button this morning. 32 MB, 4,030 files, five and a half years of writing.
Then I opened the folder to see what I got.
The writing comes out cleaner than Substack's export does. The rest of it is a different story.
Export
Settings, then Security and apps, then "Download your information". You get an email with a link. Mine took a few minutes.
The zip comes with a README listing 16 folders: blocks, bookmarks, claps, highlights, interests, ips, lists, notes, posts, profile, pubs-following, reposts, sessions, topics-following, twitter, users-following.
One of those is your work. posts holds 28 of the 32 MB.
And 4,030 files is not 4,030 articles. Every comment you ever left is its own HTML file in there too, so the count is mostly conversation. The smallest one in my folder is 2021-08-23_----2caadbdea70.html, 2 KB, and the entire content is :-)
Where Medium does better than Substack: every file is a real page. Title in the head, subtitle, author, publish date, and the canonical link in the footer. Substack hands you body fragments with no title element at all, so you have to join them against a CSV to know what you're looking at. Here you double-click a file and it opens like an article.
Images
1,559 image tags in my posts folder. Zero image files in the whole export.
Same problem as Substack. Every one of them points back at cdn-images-1.medium.com, so the pages look complete on your laptop and stay complete right up until the account is gone.
But Medium adds a twist. The links don't point at your originals. 1,103 of mine point at /max/800/, another 421 at /max/1200/. Three made it to 2560. So even if you download every image by hand, you get the web-sized copy Medium built for the feed. Not the file you uploaded.
Which means the backup happens before you publish, not after. Write the draft somewhere local, keep the images next to it, then paste into Medium. Everything of mine lives in my own app first, with a copy in iCloud.
If you didn't do that, the fix while the account is still alive is a script that walks the export, follows the CDN links and pulls the files down. A few of those exist. I haven't used them.
So: posts ✔ (mostly)
Your list
In my eyes this is the part that decides whether any of the above is worth anything, and the export doesn't even contain it. Subscriber emails are a separate download over on the audience page.
Where Medium tells you the catch, right above the Confirm export button: "You can only export email addresses of users who subscribed before April 2025 and users who you imported. If your list only includes users who subscribed after April 2025, the export will be empty."
So anyone who hit "notify me by email" on your profile after April 2025 is a number in your stats. Nothing else. You can't mail them anywhere but here.
I pulled mine to see what that looks like. A few thousand addresses. I have more than 21,000 followers.
Your words come with you. Your newer readers don't.
Pull the old ones anyway. It only gets more out of date, and those people signed up because they liked something you wrote.
Money
The partner-program folder is interesting. Eleven pages, 994 stories, each with a dollar amount next to it. Lifetime earnings per story, in a file, on my own hard drive.
Substack has no equivalent to that.
It's a humbling read too... Plenty of them earned nothing at all.
The billing side: Medium pays out to your Stripe account instead of sitting on top of it, so there's no application fee to negotiate away when you leave and no support ticket to write. You walk, the payouts stop, done.
What isn't in the zip is the tax paperwork. The 1042-S forms come by email once a year. Download them and keep them with the rest.
What it knows about you
Substack's export is mostly tracking data about readers. 61 of my 73 MB there were email opens with cities, devices and user agents.
Medium's is the mirror image. The tracking is about me.
ips.html is a list of every IP address my account was seen from, with timestamps, going back 30 days. 140 lines. Medium notes in the file that it deletes them after that. Then there are 75 sessions, 7,858 stories I clapped for, 340 highlights, 109 bookmarks, 295 X contacts who are also on Medium, and the seven people I blocked… :-D
Don't drop that folder in a shared Cloud drive and forget about it.
Also missing: view counts, read ratios, follower numbers. Stats live in the dashboard.
Addresses
Every Medium URL ends in a hex ID. ...-47b926474ce7. That ID is in every export filename and the canonical link sits in every footer, so you can rebuild the complete list of your own addresses out of the folder in about a minute.
Worth something only if the part in front of the slug belongs to you.
Custom domains are an option on Medium, as long as you have a membership. You point a domain you own at your profile in the settings, and old medium.com links redirect to it. Mine live at stories.byburk.net, which is why I connect a domain to everything I can.
If I want to move from Medium, I can… but I have to do quite a few things.
The redirect work, mainly. That hex ID means nothing to WordPress or Ghost or anything else, so moving means a rule that catches the old shape and maps it to the new one.
Annoying with your own domain, but at least, I can. It's impossible without a custom domain.
Downsides… there are always some
The domain needs a paid membership. If you're in the Partner Program you have one anyway, but it's a subscription you now depend on for your own URLs.
The export is a button you press by hand. No API, no schedule, nothing that runs while you sleep. Same as Substack.
And no backup fixes the list. You can save every word you wrote and still have no way to tell your readers where you went. That is a huge downside now. And definitely a huge plus for Substack. Until they do the same.
The Bottom Line
Export every few months, pull the old subscriber list now, save your images before you publish rather than after, keep the tax forms, and put your own domain in front of all of it.
Medium hands back more than I expected. Just not the readers. Which really sucks!
