Does My Journal Need a Backup
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.
But this is where I began to ask the question: Is any of this necessary?
Shortly after publishing last week, Joan Westberg posted that she had deleted her entire Obsidian vault. The reason? It had become a crutch rather than a means of discovery.
I’m no stranger to deleting my archives. I’ve deleted my entire Twitter archive. I’ve deleted my blog. I’ve deleted social posts so many times that I’ve probably posted the same thought multiple times in my life. There’s a catharsis to hitting delete and starting over.
Jane’s blog explains that her deletion is a need to escape a productivity tool as a mantra rather than just living life and experiencing connections naturally. As I reformat all the Day One entries — some 3,300 of them — I began to wonder what the purpose of keeping these was. Why was I spending so much time and effort reformatting files that I probably will never open?
All of our old journals aren’t meant to be read. They’re a glimpse into our past self, a reflection of who we were at that moment in time. But is that who we are today? I don’t think so. It’s definitely part of our journey to get to where we are, but do we need to be constantly reminded about the path that we took to become the person that we are today?
One of the things I liked about Day One was its ability to display all my posts on a map, providing a visual indication of my history. While all journal apps now have this feature, one of the things I removed from all the old entries was the location information. Is it really that important? Apple Photos shows me where all my photos were taken, which is cool and an indication of where I’ve been, but do I need to remember exactly where I was in the moment that I wrote something that I might never read again?
I now have a backup system, and every journal post I write into my Apple journal will get automatically saved as a text file, which I can view in anything, particularly Obsidian if I choose to do so. But do I really need that? Or is the active capturing of my thoughts in the moment what’s important? I’m not sold either way.
I’m not completely deleting all of my past journal entries, and I’m also not convinced of the need to continue archiving them into the future. I don’t know exactly where I’ll land, but right now I like the option of both reflecting on who I used to be and the option to say it doesn’t matter, as I can delete it all at any time. I don’t worry about linking posts together because that’s not the point of my journal entries; they don’t build on each other or gain insight from one entry to the next. They exist as a moment in time and, for right now, that’s enough for me.
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