How to back up your podcast subscriptions (a 5-minute OPML guide)
If you've been listening to podcasts seriously for even a few years, your subscription list is one of the more curated things you own. It represents dozens of decisions — which show to subscribe to, which host you trust, which niche interest to follow. If you sat down today with a blank library, you would not be able to recreate it in an afternoon.
Which is why it's odd that most heavy listeners don't have a backup.
If your podcast app shuts down (Castro), gets acquired and reworked into something you don't recognise, kicks you out of an account for reasons you can't easily fix, or is on a phone that gets stolen or wiped — the subscription list is gone. You'll re-add the ten shows you can remember off the top of your head and shrug about the rest.
The good news: this is the easiest backup problem you'll ever solve. Five minutes. One tiny file. No paid tool.
This is the guide.
What OPML is, and why it's the right file
OPML — Outline Processor Markup Language — is a small text file that lists every podcast you subscribe to, with the RSS feed URL of each. Every serious podcast app supports it. It's an open standard, so no one company can take it away.
The file is small. A typical heavy listener's OPML is maybe five kilobytes. You can open it in a text editor if you're curious. You can email it to yourself. You can drop it in Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, or a Notion page. Wherever it lives, if you ever need it back, you point any modern podcast app at it and your list is restored in seconds.
What OPML carries: the show's title and RSS feed URL. That's all you need to re-subscribe.
What OPML does not carry: your playback position on an episode, your listen history, your ratings, your custom playlists, your "listen later" queue, your download folder, your show-specific settings (auto-download rules, playback speed, silence-skipping preferences), or your reviews and star ratings if the app had them.
The subscription list travels. Everything else is app-local — but the subscription list is by far the biggest thing to lose, and it's the thing OPML protects.
Prune first (optional but recommended)
Before you export, this is a good moment to unsubscribe from the shows you haven't opened in six months. A leaner OPML is easier to reason about, and a leaner library is easier to keep clean going forward. You can always re-add anything later — a well-known RSS feed URL never disappears.
Skip this if you don't want to. The export step still works fine on a bloated library. It's just nicer to open a backup file and recognise every entry.
Exporting an OPML from your current app
The mechanics differ per app, but the destination file is always the same — an .opml file that ends up in your files, on iCloud/Google Drive, or emailed to yourself. Grab it and store it somewhere it will survive your phone.
Apple Podcasts
Apple hides this. On iOS there is no in-app OPML export. Your options:
- From the web: sign in at podcasts.apple.com, go to your library, and use a third-party tool like PodcastFeed.finder or the excellent open-source OPML for Apple Podcasts exporters. The workflow is the same — sign in, tap export, get the file.
- From macOS: open the Podcasts app, and while the shortcut varies between OS versions, opening Terminal and running the well-known
sqlite3command against the local Podcasts database will list your shows so you can rebuild an OPML by hand. This is fiddly and I don't recommend it unless you enjoy the terminal.
Realistic recommendation for Apple Podcasts listeners: use one of the web-based export tools. Ten seconds.
Spotify
Spotify does not support OPML export at all. This is a deliberate choice — Spotify treats your podcast library as data about you, not a portable object. If Spotify is your primary app and you want a backup, the honest reality is that you'll need to keep a manual list somewhere. Take a screenshot of your library on a regular schedule and store it in your notes app or Drive.
A tip: prioritise capturing the shows you've actually listened to in the last month. Those are the ones you'd miss if the library evaporated.
Overcast
Settings → Export OPML. Overcast emails you the file. Fast, clean.
Pocket Casts
Settings → Import & Export → Export Podcasts List. On mobile you can share the file directly to iCloud/Google Drive/email. On the web app, click your name in the top right → Import & Export.
AntennaPod (Android)
Settings → Storage → OPML Export. Saves to your device.
Podverse
Settings → Data → Export OPML.
Fountain
Settings → Data & Cache → Export OPML.
Podcast Addict (Android)
Settings → Backup → Export OPML file.
Castro (iOS)
Castro was discontinued in 2024, which is the poster-child case for why this whole exercise matters. If you still have Castro installed and the servers are still responding, email your OPML to yourself now. This may not be an option much longer.
Where to store the backup
The whole point of a backup is that it survives whatever happens to your phone or your app. Two rules:
- Somewhere off the device. iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, or email-to-self all work. A file that lives only on your phone is not a backup.
- Somewhere you'll actually find it in six months. A named folder called "Backups" with a file called
podcasts-2026-07-30.opmlis a good pattern. Date the file so you know how fresh it is.
Some heavy listeners keep three or four OPML backups from different points over the last year. Costs nothing (a few kilobytes each) and lets you go back to an older subscription list if you want to remember what you were listening to a year ago.
Optional but nice: set a calendar reminder to re-export every three months. Podcasting is add-heavy — you'll pick up ten or fifteen new subscriptions a year without noticing. A quarterly rhythm keeps the backup close to current.
When you actually need it (the restore step)
If the day comes when you need to restore your library — a phone lost, an app shut down, an account you can't get back into — every serious podcast app makes this easy.
- Podtastic asks whether you want to import an OPML during first-launch onboarding. Tap yes, pick the file. Duplicate subscriptions are silently skipped, so you can re-import safely.
- Overcast, Pocket Casts, AntennaPod, Podverse, Fountain, Podcast Addict all have an OPML import in Settings. Point at the file, wait a minute while it fetches each RSS feed, done.
- Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not support OPML import. If those are your destination apps, you're re-subscribing by hand from a text list. Better than nothing — you still have the list of shows.
What the restore does not bring back: playback position on the episode you were halfway through, your queue, your show-specific settings, your ratings. Those are app-local and travel only if you were using an app that syncs them to its own cloud account. But the subscription list — the one thing you can't easily rebuild — comes back in seconds.
Why any of this matters
OPML was a deliberate choice by the podcast industry. RSS made podcasts portable in the first place; OPML made your subscription list portable on top of that. It is one of the reasons this medium is not fully owned by any single company.
Which is why apps that don't export OPML are, in a real sense, treating your library like data about you rather than data that's yours. It's not a limitation of the format; it's a business decision.
The five-minute backup is what makes that decision affect you less. Whether or not you're planning to leave your current app, having an OPML file in cloud storage means the subscription list you spent years building is insured against everything short of the whole podcast industry disappearing. That's a rare thing in modern software.
Do the export today. Store the file somewhere you'll find it. Set the calendar reminder for three months from now. That's the whole ritual.
Give Podtastic a try. Independent podcast app, built for listeners, not for advertising companies. OPML import at first launch, OPML export from Settings so your backup stays current. Smart Skip skips past interruptions other listeners skipped. Smart Summaries and Smart Topics turn a 90-minute podcast into something you can triage. Skip Silence and Enhance Voices make voice-heavy content easier to listen to. Download now.
