Every few years the hunt starts again — a journal app that respects the writing you've already done, doesn't rent it back to you, and doesn't feel like a toy. If you're eyeing the exit from Day One, the only question that really matters is: does the archive survive the move?
It does. Export your journal from Day One (JSON, the standard export), hand the file to Retrography, and the importer carries over the things that make it yours: every entry with its text, title, and original date — the photos — the location and place name — even the weather that day, and which entries you starred. A 2019 morning in Lisbon arrives as a 2019 morning in Lisbon, not as a text file dated today.
The import is careful by design. Entries you already have are recognized and skipped, so running it twice doesn't double your journal. Every import is tracked as a batch in an import history, so you can always see exactly what arrived and when. Bring one year or bring fifteen.
What changes after the move is what happens around your old entries. They join a timeline that fills itself in — places, photos, music, sleep, drives — so the journal stops depending on your discipline. On the days you wrote nothing, there's still a day.
And the terms of ownership change, permanently: your archive lives on your phone and your own iCloud, the full-history unlock is a one-time purchase, not a subscription, and everything exports back out — readable JSON, printable PDFs — whenever you want. A journal you can leave is the only kind worth moving into.