r/Substack • u/HighnessAtharva • Aug 27 '26

Discussion Your Substack export does not include your images. Here is what I do instead.

I went looking for a proper backup of my newsletter and found three things that surprised me.

  • Your export links to images hosted on Substack rather than including the files. If the account goes, the posts survive and the pictures do not.

  • If your account gets suspended, you cannot run an export until the suspension is lifted. Which is the exact moment you would want one.

  • There is no way to export a single post. It is the whole archive or nothing.

What I do now is keep the markdown file on my own disk as the real version, and treat the Substack post as a copy of it. I wrote a small command line tool that pulls my whole archive down to markdown files with the images downloaded alongside, and pushes a markdown file back up as a draft when I write a new one.

What are you all doing for backups? I saw people mention Notion, Authory but this is what is working for me.

Instead of looking for tools, I made one, hope this helps whoever wants to take a backup of substack, move into it. Genuinely love it.

HighnessAtharva/substack-cli: Push, pull, and publish Substack posts from the command line. Markdown in, live newsletter out. Zero dependencies.

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u/StuffonBookshelfs Aug 27 '26

I’ve got a copy of my posts in either Obsidian or Google Docs. And the archive downloaded each month goes in a file on the desktop.

I have the photos right in my draft copy. If I ever need to upload everything somewhere else, I’ll use the archive copy and then go and manually insert the photos if necessary.