The Shocking Truth About Losing Your Journal Forever — Are You Prepared?
This Just In: I took a lot of your suggestions to heart and gave Obsidian a try. What I found was a bigger question.
Last week, I shared that I was moving out of Day One and looking for alternatives. Many of you suggested Obsidian, so I decided to give it a try. I’m not sure I found answers, but I did find a bigger question.
Like many new applications, I first encountered Obsidian years ago, when it was still in its early stages of development. I probably read some blog or a post on social media talking about the next great markdown writing tool, and I jumped on board. However, what I saw in those early days wasn’t enough to convince me to leave my beloved iA Writer, nor did any of the internal linking or graphing tools make any sense to me. All the links between my articles live on my blog and don’t need to be stored in my text files, let alone in a proprietary format. So, I deleted the app and moved on.
Based on everyone’s recommendation, I started playing with the app again. It has come a long way since those early days, and I can see why so many people recommended it to me last week. Obsidian is an interesting concept where the app is simply a file editor that lives on top of any folder on your computer. There are no privacy implications here because it merely works with the files you already have and does not send anything to anyone else’s servers. This I like.
Obsidian’s company makes money by selling a proprietary sync system, but you can use iCloud or any other third-party sync system that allows individualized folder access on your computer. Because it’s just an interface for working with existing markdown files, Obsidian seemed like an excellent opportunity to be the backup for my previous Day One journal.
I extracted all the archived entries into markdown format and dumped them in a folder monitored by Obsidian. I then spent a few days cleaning up the files by renaming them so they made sense in Finder or the Obsidian file viewer. Now I have a complete backup of my previous Day One journal, and I’ve set up a Siri Shortcut so that when I write in the current Apple Journal, it saves a backup file to the folder that Obsidian sits on top of. It was a productive week.
