Taking your content elsewhere

./blog.sh export ~/my-blog-export        # everything, drafts included
./blog.sh export ~/public-copy --no-drafts
./blog.sh export ~/somewhere --dry-run   # counts, writes nothing

Writes the archive as a tree of markdown files with YAML front matter, in Jekyll's layout: _posts/2026-05-01-slug.md, _drafts/slug.md, pages at the root, media copied under assets/<year>/<slug>/. Without a directory it writes to tmp/export. A directory that already has something in it is refused until you repeat the command with --force, which writes alongside what is there -- an export never deletes anything, at either end. With --force, files an earlier export of this site wrote are refreshed in place; anything else -- a cloned site's own _config.yml, a post of somebody else's under the same file name, a different picture under the same path -- is left exactly as it is, the post of ours goes beside it under another name, and the summary lists what was left alone.

A post that cannot be written -- a stray byte from an old import, a slug that is not one path segment -- is named at the end and the rest of the archive still comes out; the command then exits 1, so a backup made by cron is seen to be short.

It reads only the archive on disk -- deliberately, so it works on an installation whose env.sh is gone or whose config no longer parses.

Three things are worth knowing before you rely on the result:

• The summary counts what could not stay markdown. Video, audio and link cards are written as HTML -- video and audio deliberately, because the engine's own !![caption](url) reads as an exclamation mark and an image to everybody else's markdown parser. Every engine that passes HTML through renders them properly, and importing the tree back gives them again as blocks -- each carries its own definition in a comment above it and a closing <!-- /blogsh:block --> line under it, both of which other engines ignore. (Trees exported before 1.8 have no closing line and are still read; an embed with a blank line inside it came home from those with part of its markup as text.) It also says how many of the media files copied no block names: they are in the tree, but an import back brings home only what the posts refer to.
• redirect_from is written in the shape jekyll-redirect-from reads, and it merges both kinds of old address -- where the post lived on the platform it came from, and where it lived here before a rename. On a Jekyll site with that plugin, every address the post has ever had goes on answering.
• An export can be imported back, into an EMPTY archive. ./import.sh → Markdown tree reads the blogsh: block the export writes, so posts keep their series, their redirects, their announcement URLs and their other languages -- a post's translations ride under blogsh: whole, with the address and the old addresses each language has, since no other engine has a word for them, and with each file their blocks show named by the path it has in the tree, so the import brings it and gives both texts the one name it has afterwards (the body of the file is the post's own language; what the site says about itself in the other ones is config/site.<lang>.yml, which is configuration and travels with the backup, not with the export). That is the supported way to move an installation to another machine or another host, and -- run against a scratch copy -- the way to check that an export really did come out whole.

⚠️ Not into an archive that already holds those posts. A post that carries an identity of its own -- imported from Twitter, Ghost, a feed -- is matched by it and updated in place. Everything you typed yourself carries {platform: manual} and nothing else, and the engine refuses to match two of those on purpose: pairing them would overwrite one person's writing with another's. So each hand-written post is written AGAIN under a serial slug. Every other rule in check lets the copy pass, because it has an address of its own; only its "looks like a copy of another" finding catches it, and only after the fact. On a blog whose posts are all hand-written that is the whole archive, twice. The wizard recognises this site's own export by its posts -- the blogsh: key every exported post carries, and slugs this archive already has -- which works for exports made by any version, and says so before it asks for confirmation. A tree of ours going into an archive that already holds posts is also asked about outright, with no as the default. But the rule is simpler than the warning: the target should be empty.