Today's update is an important addition and has been highlighted by the recent closure of OpenDiary and the frustrations felt by people who left there to come here, only to find that they couldn't easily get their old entries out of OpenDiary to post here.

DearDiary.Net now offers the ability to export your entire diary in various formats to allow you, should you choose, to either import them into another site, or if the other site doesn't offer an import facility to at least be able to copy and paste each entry easily.

To be clear, you could always request an export of your diary - but previously that was in the form of a Support Request and I would create an export of your entries for you and e-mail it to you as a text (CSV) file. Whilst this did meet the law of GDPR it wasn't easy and the format wasn't overly conducive to easy input on another site.

Of course, I hope you all stay with us forever, but the option to retrieve your own data is now much easier than it was yesterday if you do choose to leave us.

The Export Diary option is available under the System Menu (the main menu on Desktop Mode, and the Hamburger Menu on Mobile). The export is best done on a laptop/desktop computer because the generated file could be quite big, but it should work on mobile too.

Today there are 2 formats that can exported. The first is a Javascript Object Notation (JSON) export which provides a minimalistic export which another platform could potentially use to import your entries. They would need to support the format of the data that the export provides, but a coder would be able to create this relatively easily if they had enough demand. This format could be used to 'back up' your own entries if you decided you needed to in order that, should something go wrong and you needed to restore from a local backup you could do so. I will be providing an import diary option shortly for this format. Exporting any diary images is not supported in this format as it is a text only file.

The second format is much more useful globally and is the Markdown format which is a widely used text format (which allows the use of bold, italic, lists, headers, links, images etc). Choosing this format will export your diary into a zip file for download, with each entry written into a separate file within the zip. An index.md is provided to help you navigate the exported entries. Importantly, this format can include your diary images. For those with multiple diaries, you can choose to export all diaries or just choose one at a time.

Both of these export formats are available to Free and Plus users. The export process can be quite a heavy task for the server and as such Free Users are restricted to one export per day, while Plus Users can export once every hour. It's pretty unlikely anyone would need to export more than that anyway, but to protect the server from being overloaded those are the timeframes at present. I will need to monitor these to ensure the demand on the server isn't too high.

I have provided the option to password protect the zip file, which should offer some protection against unauthorised access. Choose a strong password, but do no forget it. The DD server does not store the password, and we cannot recover the password on the zip file. If you lose it the zip file cannot be opened. (Of course you can re-export later if this happens, but if the data is lost in the meantime then no-one at DD can help you unlock the zip file. Please don't ask us).

I plan to introduce at least a couple more export formats which will be available to Plus Users, those being a webarchive format where the diary is exported including the header and footer and the entries being exported as individual HTML pages. This would enable Plus User to take their diaries to a normal web hosting service and simply upload the relevant files. The other option for export will be a formatted PDF document containing your diary cover page and entries etc. I don't yet have a timeframe for these export formats as I have a couple of other bits to work on as well, but it shouldn't be too much longer.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

I must point out that this is a COMPLETE DIARY EXPORT feature. This means that ALL your diary entries are exported, including (if you tick the box) ALL comments associated with those entries. If you have private or followers only entries these WILL BE INCLUDED in the export and once exported DearDiary.Net cannot provide access control over these entries. If someone gets hold of your export file (and can provide the password to the zip file if you set one) they will be able to read ALL your entries.

This is by design because your entries are your property and you're entitled to them - I just wanted to point out that we can't provide access control to that data once it leaves our servers.

Let me know your thoughts and if you have any questions, or requests for additional options for this.