How to Export a Day One Journal and Check It Worked

2026-09-03 · Yesterself

Exporting a journal feels finished the moment a file appears. It isn't. The file appearing and the file being complete are two different facts, and you tend to find out which one you have months later, when you go looking for an entry that is not there.

This is the full round trip for one specific app. Where the export lives in Day One, which format to choose if you might move somewhere else later, and the step almost nobody does: opening the archive and counting things before you cancel a subscription or delete anything.

App menus move. Treat the locations below as a starting point and check the app's own help if the wording has changed.

Write down three numbers first

Verification is impossible without a target. Before you touch the export screen, record what you expect to find.

• How many journals you have. Some exports handle one journal at a time. If you have seven and export once, you have one seventh of your writing.
• Roughly how many entries. The app usually shows a count somewhere in its stats or journal list. An approximate number is fine. You are looking for a missing thousand, not a missing three.
• Your oldest entry's date and your newest. These are the two ends of the rope. If both survive, the middle usually did too.

Then note anything unusual in your archive: audio recordings, video, PDF attachments, drawings, an entry with fifteen photos, a journal you have not opened since 2019. Odd things are where exports quietly fail, and they are the last things you would ever check.

If any journal is end-to-end encrypted, export it from a device where it is already unlocked, and inspect that output more carefully than the rest.

Where the export lives

On iPhone and Android, the export is in the app's settings rather than inside a journal, usually in a section named something like Import/Export. You pick a journal, pick a format, and the app produces a file it hands to the share sheet. Send it somewhere real. The share sheet is happy to route your entire life into a chat thread you will delete next week.

On the Mac app, look in the File menu for an export command. Desktop exports are usually easier to verify, because you get a folder you can actually open and poke at instead of a zip trapped inside a phone.

Two practical notes. Large archives take time and can fail partway on a phone with low storage, so plug in, free up space, and do it on a desktop if you have one. And if the export offers a date range or a filter, leave it alone. You want everything.

Which format to choose

Most journaling apps offer some combination of a structured format, a plain text format, and PDF. Check what your version actually offers, then choose by what you intend to do.

A structured export (JSON) is the one to take if you may switch apps. It keeps the machine-readable parts: creation dates, modification dates, tags, locations, and the links between an entry and its photos. This is what an importer on the other end can read. Opened by a human it is a wall of braces, which is exactly why people skip it and later regret it.

Plain text or Markdown is the one to take if you want to read this in ten years. No app required, no importer required, readable on anything with a screen. You typically lose some metadata, and photos become references you have to match up by hand.

PDF is for printing or handing to a person. It is a document, not an archive. Do not let it be your only copy.

The honest answer is to take two: the structured export because software can read it, and a readable export because you can. They are files. Storage is cheap. The decision you are avoiding by taking both is one you would otherwise have to make correctly today, about an app you have not chosen yet.

The verification step

Here is the part that gets skipped. Do it before anything irreversible.

1. Unzip it somewhere permanent. Not Downloads. A folder you will still recognize in three years, in whatever backup you already trust.
2. Count the entries. Open the structured file in a text editor that reports how many matches a search found, then search for a field that appears once per entry, usually the creation date. Read one entry's worth of the file first to confirm that field appears exactly once there. Then the match count is your entry count, and you can compare it to the number you wrote down.
3. Count the media. Open the photos folder and let the file manager tell you how many items it holds. Compare it to what the app claimed. Then look for the other folders: video, audio, PDFs. If you know you recorded voice entries and there is no audio folder, stop and find out why.
4. Open both ends of the rope. Find your oldest entry and your newest in the exported text. If the oldest is three years newer than you remember, something filtered.
5. Spot-check the strange ones. The entry with fifteen photos. The one in Arabic or Japanese or with accented names. The one you know had a location pinned. Open five entries at random from different years and read them.
6. Do a test import. If you already know where you are going, import the archive into the new app and count again there. Export succeeding and import succeeding are, once more, two different facts.

Anything that fails here is fixable while you still have the original app, the original subscription, and the original data on the original server. That window is the entire point of doing this in order.

What to ask of wherever you land next

An archive you can leave with is not a feature. It is the baseline, and it is worth checking before you commit years of writing to a new app: does export work on the free tier, in an open format, without a support ticket?

We built Yesterself that way. Export is free forever, including on the free tier, in formats other software can read, and there is no account and no email address to be locked out of. The identity is twelve words you hold yourself, which also means holding onto them is your job. Yesterself is not released yet, so it is not a destination for an archive today; there is a waiting list on the site for when it is. The question stands either way, and you should put it to whichever app you are actually moving to this week. If privacy is part of why you are moving, it is worth understanding what end-to-end encryption actually changes about who can read your entries.

Before you cancel or delete anything

Order matters more than speed here.

1. Export, and verify as above.
2. Put a second copy somewhere different. Same file, different place. A copy that lives only on the laptop you are about to replace is not a backup.
3. Keep the old app installed and signed in for one more billing cycle. One extra month buys you the ability to re-export when you discover, in week three, that your 2018 journal did not come along.
4. Then cancel the subscription.
5. Deleting your account is a separate action, usually irreversible, and worth doing last if you do it at all. Read what the app says deletion does to data on its servers before you press it, because that is the one step you cannot undo by resubscribing.

Afterward

Open the readable copy sometime that first week, not to migrate anything, just to read. An export is the rare moment your whole archive sits in one place, unsorted by any app's idea of what matters. People find things there.

Then leave it alone. A verified archive in a boring folder is worth more than a clever system you will not maintain. You did the hard part already: you checked.

Common questions

Which Day One export format should I choose?

Take the structured JSON export if you may move to another app, because it preserves dates, tags and the links between entries and photos. Also take a plain text or Markdown copy so a human can read the archive without any software. PDF is for printing, not for archiving.

Does the export include my photos and audio?

A structured export usually arrives as a zip containing the entry data plus folders of media. Check what folders are actually present against what you know is in your journal, especially audio, video and PDF attachments, since those are the easiest things to lose without noticing.

How can I tell whether the export is complete?

Write down your entry count, journal count and oldest entry date before you export, then check the archive against those three numbers. Open the JSON in a text editor and count occurrences of a per-entry field like creationDate, and let your file manager count the items in the photos folder.

Can I import a Day One export into a different journaling app?

Many apps can import a structured JSON archive, but support varies and changes over time. Check the destination app's own import documentation before you cancel anything, and run a test import while you still have access to the original.

Should I cancel my subscription before or after exporting?

After, and not immediately after. Export, verify the archive, make a second copy, and keep the old app installed for one more billing cycle so you can re-export if something turns out to be missing. Deleting the account is a separate step and worth leaving until last.