Back Up Substack Completely: Posts, Images, Subscribers

To back up Substack completely, you need two copies. The first is Substack's own export, which holds your post text and your subscriber list. The second is an offline copy of your public site, which keeps the images, navigation and archive page and works even if Substack disappears. The export alone is not enough, because exported posts may still pull their images from Substack's servers. This guide covers both steps, what each one misses, and how to combine them.

What a complete Substack backup needs

Before you click anything, decide what you would need to rebuild or prove your newsletter if your account vanished tomorrow. For most writers that list looks like this:

• Post text, including the full text of paid posts.
• Images, saved as actual files rather than links that point back to Substack.
• Subscribers: email addresses, plus free or paid status if you plan to move them.
• URLs and dates, so you can set up redirects and keep the chronology after a move.
• The reading experience: the archive page, the about page, the design and the links between posts, so the backup is something you can browse rather than a pile of files.

No single tool covers all five. Substack's export is the only source for subscribers and for paid content behind the paywall. A crawl of the public site is the reliable way to get self-contained pages with local images. Together they cover the list.

Step 1: Export Substack posts and subscribers with the official export

Substack has a built-in export in the publication settings. The exact menu labels have changed over time, so look for a section called Import/Export or Exports in your publication's settings.

1. Open your Substack dashboard and go to Settings.
2. Find the import/export section and start a new export.
3. Wait until Substack prepares the file. Depending on the size of your newsletter, this can take a while, and you may get a notification or email when it is ready.
4. Download the ZIP and keep it somewhere that is not tied to your Substack login, such as an external drive or a separate cloud account.

Open the ZIP right away and check what it contains, because the contents can change and differ from what older guides describe. Typically you should find a spreadsheet listing your posts with titles, dates and URLs, a folder with one HTML file per post, and a CSV with subscriber email addresses. Confirm each part:

• Does the number of HTML files match the number of posts you have published?
• Do paid posts contain their full text, not just the preview?
• Does the subscriber CSV include everyone, and does it show which subscribers are paid?

If you only need the subscriber list, the subscriber section of your dashboard usually has its own export button that downloads a CSV directly. Paid subscriptions run through Stripe, so payment records live in your connected Stripe account as well.

Does the Substack export include images?

This is the gap most step-by-step guides skip. The exported HTML files often look complete when you open them, but the images can display only because your browser fetches them from Substack's image servers in the background. If that is the case, the export holds the addresses of your images, not the images themselves. If Substack ever stopped serving them, or your publication were deleted, those posts would open with empty boxes.

You can test this in two minutes:

1. Unzip the export and open one image-heavy post in your browser.
2. Disconnect from the internet: switch off Wi-Fi or unplug the cable.
3. Reload the page with a hard refresh, or open a different post you have not viewed yet.

If the images disappear, your backup depends on Substack still being online. Another way to check is to right-click an image, open it in a new tab and look at the address. If it starts with a Substack domain rather than a local file path, the image is not in your ZIP.

Comments are a similar question. Check whether your export contains them, because guides disagree and Substack may have changed it. If you can't find your readers' comments in the export, treat them as not backed up.

Step 2: Save the public site as an offline ZIP with local images

The second half of the backup is a full copy of your publication as visitors see it. This includes the home page, the archive page, every public post, the about page, and all the images, stylesheets and fonts saved locally. Website Downloader does this in the browser, so there is nothing to install:

1. Open the download form on the home page.
2. Paste the address of your publication, for example yourname.substack.com, or your custom domain if you use one.
3. Start the download and watch the live progress as pages are found. You can close the tab; the crawl continues on the server.
4. Download the finished ZIP, unzip it, and open index.html.

Now repeat the offline test from above. Disconnect, open a few posts, and check that the images, the layout and the links between posts still work. If something is missing, the guide to fixing a downloaded website with missing images and CSS explains the usual causes.

Two things are worth checking in the copy:

• Post count. Compare the number of post folders with the post list from your official export. Substack's archive page loads more posts as you scroll. If older posts are reachable only through that scrolling, a crawler that follows links might find fewer of them. If posts are missing, they are still covered by the text in your official export, but not in browsable form.
• Custom domain. If your newsletter runs on its own domain, download that domain, since it is the address readers know and the one your links use.

Paid posts, comments and subscribe forms: what a public copy cannot capture

A crawl sees exactly what a logged-out visitor sees. That has clear consequences:

• Paid posts appear only up to the paywall. Pages behind a login are not downloaded, so the full text of subscriber-only posts must come from your official export.
• Subscribe buttons, sign-up forms, likes and new comments need Substack's servers. They show up in the copy as page elements but do nothing offline.
• Existing comments may or may not appear, depending on whether the page delivers them as plain HTML or loads them with JavaScript after the page opens. Open a post with comments in your offline copy to see what you got.
• Search on the site will not work offline.

This is why the two copies complement each other. The export has the paywalled text and the subscribers. The offline ZIP has the self-contained pages with local images and the look of the site. Store them side by side, ideally in a folder named with the date of the backup.

How to move from Substack to Ghost or WordPress and keep your URLs

Substack post addresses follow the pattern /p/post-slug. If you move to another platform and your old links stop working, you lose search rankings and every link other sites have pointed at your posts. How much you can preserve depends on the domain.

• Custom domain: you control the domain, so you can point it at the new platform and keep or redirect every URL. In WordPress, a custom permalink structure of /p/%postname%/ reproduces Substack's pattern directly. Ghost uses /post-slug/ by default. You can either add a redirect rule that sends /p/slug to /slug/, or set up custom routes so posts stay under /p/.
• substack.com subdomain: the address belongs to Substack, and you cannot add your own server-side redirects there. Plan for old links to keep pointing at Substack, and link prominently to your new home from your last posts.

For the content itself, Ghost offers a Substack import in its migration tools, and WordPress has importers and plugins that read Substack's export. Either way, check the imported posts for images. If the export only referenced Substack's image servers, the new site may still be loading them from there. The offline ZIP from Step 2 is your fallback source for the original image files. After the move, you can make a static copy of the new site too; see exporting a Ghost blog to static HTML or converting WordPress to static HTML.

Large newsletters and backing up on a schedule

Every page counts toward a download's limit: the home page, the archive page, each post, and pages like about. Substack can also give each post a separate comments page, which counts as an extra subpage. A newsletter with a few dozen posts often fits within the Free plan's 100 subpages. It needs no account, but the archive is kept for only 1 day, so download it promptly.

For larger publications, see the options on the pricing page:

How often should you back up? Run the official export and a fresh offline copy after every few posts, and at least once a month if you publish weekly. Do both before any big change, such as switching platforms, changing your domain or pausing the newsletter. Monthly plans can be cancelled at any time, so a plan for just the months around a migration is an option. The features page and FAQ cover the details.

If a newsletter is already gone from the web, a live crawl will not help. A copy can sometimes be rebuilt from Internet Archive captures with the Wayback Machine downloader. See the step-by-step guide to restoring a website from the Wayback Machine.

FAQ

How do I export my Substack subscriber list?

Use the subscriber section of your Substack dashboard, which usually offers a CSV export, or the full export under Settings. Open the CSV and confirm it lists every subscriber and their status. Store it securely, since it contains personal data your readers trusted you with.

Can I download a Substack newsletter I subscribe to but don't run?

You can make an offline copy of its public pages, but paid posts stay behind the login and are not downloaded, even if you are a paying subscriber. Keeping a copy for personal reading is generally treated differently from republishing it. The rules depend on your country, so ask a lawyer before you reuse someone else's writing publicly.

Does a backup work the same for a Substack on a custom domain?

Yes. The official export is identical, and for the offline copy you enter your custom domain instead of the substack.com address. A custom domain also makes it much easier to keep your URLs if you later move platforms.

Are paid posts included in my backup?

Not in the public offline copy, which shows paid posts only up to the paywall. The full text has to come from the official export you run as the owner, so open a few paid posts in that export to confirm they are complete.