This is a follow-up to the Other Tools: Day One EOL post from last July (2023). I'm writing this as a cautionary tale to anyone relying on Day One as their journaling app.
With my subscription about to expire, I decided to take another look at all my exported journal entries, to make absolutely sure nothing was missing (1) . Well, it's a good thing I did: I spent two hours deciphering missing images and audio files, and relinking them from the original journals (I temporarily re-installed Day One to do this). The title of this post is the text string that appeared in their place. In the end, there were still 82 entries containing lost data, going back all the way to 2012. Mostly audio, but many pictures as well. In an app whose sole purpose is to preserve memories, I find that unforgivable. I also never would've known if I hadn't pointed a magnifying glass at those journals.
To be clear: everything was fine and dandy inside Day One itself. All the attachments were there. And the problem—as I see it—isn't that Day One locks you in, it's that it pretends not to. The app offers export options that give the illusion of openness, but that don't actually work properly. From what I've gathered dealing with this:
Markdown exports don't retain original creation date + erase all attachments references. To put this plainly: exported journals don’t really exist anymore.
JSON exports are much better, but appear to sometimes mess up image IDs—which leads to missing pics on import. At least that's what it looked like when I examined the code on some of the entries affected.
Audio files don't export at all? Or sometimes? Maybe? It's such a mess that I can't even tell.
All export options, regardless of format, remove the metadata associated with entries (weather, location etc).
That last one is downright infuriating: why? Day One could include that metadata as a nice code block at the bottom of each exported file. But it simply disappears. As it stands, moving away from Day One means losing context on every single moment you captured.
Look, Apple's new Journal app certainly isn't any less siloed—but then, we know this. Apple software is always notoriously bad at offering means to export data in a way that fully preserves the original content. But Day One is a juggernaut in the digital journaling space, and I always trusted it as a safe repository for...my life, basically. As it turns out, that's not exactly the case.
Just something to be aware of.
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1: There's another reason too, but I'll share that later.
