Introducing: backup and export

Months of logging turn a tracker into something you would be annoyed to lose. I built Money Diary for myself, which is exactly the kind of project that can quietly disappear, so getting your data out had to be a feature rather than a promise.

Settings has a Data export & backup section. Two files come out of it, for two different jobs.

The CSV backup, for restoring

This is the machine-readable one: a full dump of your ledger in the shape the app can read back. Keep it somewhere safe and you can restore from it later, into a fresh account if it comes to that.

You can protect it with a passphrase — at least eight characters — and you will be asked for your account password before the export runs. Both matter for the obvious reason: the file is every transaction you have ever made, and it is about to leave the app.

The spreadsheet report, for reading

The other download is a spreadsheet meant for humans. Open it in Excel, Numbers or Sheets and slice your own way, which is the right answer whenever you want something the analytics page does not do.

You can export a selection rather than everything, so pulling one year for your accountant does not mean handing over five.

Restoring

Restore takes a CSV backup and reads it back in. If the file was protected, you supply the passphrase you set; without it the file stays a file.

Worth doing once while you still have the original data, so you find out that it works before you need it to. That advice applies to every backup anyone has ever made and is ignored roughly as often.

Why this exists at all

Money Diary is a personal project used by me and a handful of friends. It is real and it works, but it is one person’s side project, and you should not have to trust that indefinitely to use it. An export you can take elsewhere is the honest version of that deal.