Keep a real backup of your Ghost blog on disk
Most people discover they have no backup the day they need one. A botched theme update, a hosting account that lapses, a migration that goes sideways, or simply a post you mangled and saved — and the version you wanted is gone. Ghost gives you an export, but it is a single JSON file that is awkward to read, easy to forget to run, and not something you would ever edit by hand. This guide covers a sturdier habit: keeping your entire blog mirrored as plain markdown files on your own Mac, where it is readable, portable, and trivially easy to copy somewhere safe.
What Ghost’s own export does and doesn’t give you
Ghost can export your content from the admin area as a JSON file, and you should know where that button is. It captures your posts and some settings in one download. But it has real limits as a backup strategy. It is a manual step you have to remember to run, the file is a dense blob you cannot meaningfully read or diff, and restoring from it means importing the whole thing back rather than recovering one post. It is a snapshot you stuff in a drawer, not a living copy you can actually work with.
The deeper problem is that a once-in-a-while JSON dump does not match how blogs are actually lost. The risk is rarely “the entire database vanished at midnight.” It is the slow stuff: an edit you regret, a post you overwrote, a field you cleared and only noticed a month later. For that, you want a copy that updates continuously and that you can browse like ordinary files.
A continuous markdown mirror instead
This is what Specter is for. It is a small native macOS app that does two-way sync between your Ghost blog and a folder of plain markdown files. Once it is connected, every post lives on your disk as a .md file with its frontmatter — title, tags, status, feature image URL, and excerpt — preserved. Edit in Ghost and the change pulls down; edit locally and it pushes back up. If you have not set this up yet, start with connecting Specter to your Ghost blog, which walks through pasting your Admin API key and choosing a folder.
The backup falls out of that naturally. The folder Specter keeps in sync is, by definition, a current copy of every post you have. It is not a quarterly chore you might forget; it is just where your blog already lives on disk. Because the files are standard markdown, you can read them in any editor, search them with the tools you already use, and — crucially — restore one post by copying back a single file rather than re-importing your whole site.
It is worth being precise about scope, because an honest backup is one you understand. Specter syncs posts: the body, title, tags, status, feature image URL, and custom excerpt. It does not pull down your images themselves (you reference those by URL), your theme, your members list, or your newsletter settings. So the markdown folder is a complete, recoverable copy of your writing — the part that took you years and that no theme reinstall can bring back — but it is not a full server image. For themes and members, keep Ghost’s own export as a complement; for the words, the markdown mirror is the thing you will actually reach for.
Making the copy genuinely safe
A folder on one Mac is already better than no backup, but the point of files is that they are easy to put in more than one place. Once your posts are local markdown, every backup tool you own suddenly works on your blog. Let the folder live inside iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or a Backblaze-style backup and you have an off-machine copy without thinking about it. Time Machine covers it automatically along with the rest of your Mac.
The version most worth setting up is git. Putting the synced folder under version control turns your backup into a full, diffable history — every change to every post, kept forever, with the ability to roll any post back to any past state. That is the subject of its own guide, putting your Ghost blog under version control with git, and it pairs naturally with what you have here: the markdown folder is the backup, and git is the time machine on top of it. For the related question of recovering an earlier version of a single post, see how to undo a change to a Ghost post.
The mental model is the one this whole site keeps coming back to. Ghost stays your publishing home. Your Mac holds the source of truth as plain files you own outright. And because those files are just markdown in a folder you picked, backing up your blog stops being a task you schedule and becomes something that is simply, quietly already done.